The team Product Owner is responsible for identifying what will be developed and in what order and for the overall success the solution. They define and accept user stories, and therefore must be empowered as the central point of product leadership.
In a scaled agile environment (i.e., multiple scrum teams working a common product backlog), a Product Manager coordinates with the team Product Owners to plan Product Increments for a release train.
Below are the responsibilities at which a beginning Product Owner needs to be effective in order to enable a team to get started in Scrum:
Identify business priorities for the next sprint.
Breakdown priority items into sprint-sized PBIs.
Provide, at the beginning of the sprint, the acceptance criteria that will be used to evaluate each in-scope PBI.
Accept PBI as "done".
Establish and maintain a good rapport and mutual trust with the team.
Motivate the team to perform to their full potential and act as a catalyst to help them to collectively meet sprint commitments and continuously improve.
Below are the responsibilities at which a novice Product Owner needs to be effective in order to represent the business' priorities and to enable a team to develop a predictable velocity and cadence and to become self-managing:
Keep the backlog current with all known epics, stories, and enablers.
Constantly prepare the backlog for the next planning window.
Prioritize (and re-prioritize) and sequence product backlog items for the current and upcoming sprint and effectively articulate the reasons for these decisions to all stakeholders.
Work with the team to review implementation alternatives and select the one that best suits the business priorities.
Quickly make crucial, mid-sprint decisions on the acceptance criteria and on the type and rigor of testing appropriate for critical functionalities.
Balance the trade-offs between risk, value, delay, and expense inherent in software development.
Evangelize agile practices and help the business adapt to agile ways of working.
Understand team strengths and improvement areas and motivate the team to recognize these in service of continuous improvement.
Educate the team on the value and impact of their deliverables on the business.
Hold and communicate the vision for overall business solutions and how to evolve the product into a long-term, viable solution through the development of specific product increments.
Using a consistent value range, quantify each story's relative business value, time criticality, and risk reduction and opportunity enablement.
Use robust prioritizing techniques, such as WSJF.
Lead long-range release and roadmap planning and re-prioritize product backlog items as needed to correctly align with priorities for upcoming sprint planning.
Not everyone makes a great agile product owner. While the product owner's most basic responsibility is to serve as a messenger for the business, they are also responsible for holding the vision of the process and the product and aligning all stakeholders with it.
Characteristics for success include ...
Knowledgeable about their product and business priorities and effective at articulating these to the team and other stakeholders.
Empowered to make decisions about priorities and acceptance criteria.
Understands and articulates the cost inherent in the delay of bug fixes and technical debt relief, and the value of investment in enabler technology, spikes, and continuous integration infrastructure.
Speaks development language. To help the team be agile and to gain and maintain their respect, a Product Owner needs to understand and correctly use their vocabulary.
Prepared and flexible.
Responsible and responsive to their stakeholders and to the team.
Believes in the process and the teams.
Able to say "no" to the business. Good sprint management means honoring the sprint boundaries. Requests for scope changes (either to current stories or by adding new ones) should be put on the backlog for a future sprint. Good backlog management means a manageable product backlog with items that are likely to get realized. Adding items to the backlog knowing nothing will happen with them only creates waste and false expectations.
Able to say "no" to the team. "Perfect" is the enemy of "good". A product owner needs to help the team stay focused on the minimum viable product (MVP) and proactively adds enablers and spikes to the backlog in order to address root causes and technical debt.
Fun and reasonable. No one wants to be led by someone humorless.
Understand customer need (requirements) up front.
Document requirements in a full MRD/PRD.
Fully plan and commit to schedule, including through delivery/deployment.
Discourage change or tightly control it through a CCB.
Assess progress on milestone boundaries.
Release when scope commitments have been achieved.
Provide acceptance criteria up front (i.e., what the minimum viable solution needs in order to be accepted) and address clarifying questions through constant interaction with the team in the sprint.
Document high-level vision and solution intent.
Forecast a long-term roadmap, and commit to near-term release.
Re-assess needs and adapt to change with every iteration (sprint and/or release).
Receive demonstrations of incrementally improved system on every iteration (sprint and release).
Release on fixed cadence.