The digital product owner plays an essential role in priming your digital products and initiatives for success. Here's why – and how to establish effective product ownership at your organisation.
First up, let’s just clarify what we mean by ‘digital product’. A digital product is a software enabled product or service that provides tangible benefit or value to you and your customers.
The digital product owner is a role within your digital product delivery process and the SCRUM framework.
The person who takes on this role identifies and ensures business value as the digital product or digital prototype is developed.
A product owner is responsible for gathering feedback, making decisions, and ensuring that the voice of the customer is heard and acted on throughout digital product design and the delivery of that product.
As the bridge between strategy makers, stakeholders, and delivery teams, a product owner is responsible for making sure that digital products meet diverse customer needs and clearly defined strategic goals.
There's a lot at stake when digital products and initiatives fail to meet customer needs and clearly defined strategic outcomes:
Product ownership plays an important role in navigating this minefield. The digital product owner collaborates closely with stakeholders, customers, and product and delivery teams to ensure that digital products deliver early and lasting value to you and your customers.
The product owner works closely with your product manager, who develops and refines the product roadmap or digital roadmap of initiatives and features to be developed in line with the available budget and resources.
Together, these individuals play a valuable role in helping organisations to shift their mindset and processes away from one-off projects.
Instead, they help businesses move towards programmes of continuous improvement and transformation that drive sustainable business growth and meet changing customer needs
Product owners use feedback and data to ensure that digital products deliver early and sustainable value.
They can also be the driving force behind small digital experiments that show the worth of digital investment to senior leadership teams that are slow to allocate resource. They can test the smallest element possible and ensure that product development is based on evidence, rather than assumptions.
The digital product owner needs to be confident, resilient, and happy to make important decisions, often with imperfect information.
Their roles include:
There are clear benefits to effective product ownership, including a positive impact on revenue. But many organisations still operate without a recognised or properly assigned digital product owner.
When we polled digital managers to see why this might be the case, they cited things like:
This suggests that many organisations don’t understand the role of the product owner – or the relationship and differences between product managers and owners (product manager is a job, whereas product owner is a role you play on a Scrum team).
In my experience, product management fails when organisations do not empower the product owner to lead the decision-making, or where the product owner is micro-managed by others within their organisation.
Another key challenge is where the product owner is unable to devote sufficient time to deliver the role effectively due to other roles and responsibilities.
Several of the digital managers we spoke with said that product ownership at their organisation had room for improvement, and that they intended to review the relationship between product ownership and product success.
Without effective product ownership, the risk of ‘scope creep’, un-prioritised work, poorly defined requirements, and running behind schedule increases dramatically – and there's a negative impact on value delivery.
Product ownership is far more effective where an organisation has appointed a dedicated product owner who understands the value of investing time in aligning strategy makers and digital teams.
Many organisations will need to build a business case for this role and will need to look at how internal structures and governance supports product ownership.
But the value of product ownership also hinges on the capabilities of the product owner.
I've seen many Agile efforts fail because of poor communication and decision making skills in the person selected for the product owner role. Or a lack of mandate or seniority within the business in general. In these cases, the product owner simply becomes a go-between. Or, at worst, a bottleneck with no real power to improve the speed of iteration.
Even with the right individual in place, a business will need to fully support its product owner, understand their pressures, provide guidance, and take measures to harness their important role within product delivery.
Supported by the right processes, practices, and methodologies, product owners are invaluable in helping a business to transform digitally and deliver successful digital products.
By managing different stakeholders and their expectations – and helping to establish a digital culture focused on data-led continuous improvement – the product owner is key to ensuring products continue to address real and changing customer needs.
