What is a Product Owner?

The Product Owner, also called PO, is one of the main driving forces in a team building a technical product. They work within the product team in collaboration with developers and UX/UI designers, and also in direct contact with end users.

• Understanding and embodying end-user needs as best as possible is the Product Owner's main role. To do this, they work on the discovery phase, where they try to understand the project's various problems through surveys, interviews, data analysis, or workshops.
• Coordinating the functional and visual design phase for the user need they specified, supporting UX/UI designers in producing mockups for the feature that addresses that need.
• Launching the tech team on developing the feature as soon as it's ready to be implemented. The PO must validate the topic's priority beforehand, in line with the roadmap.
• Ensuring the feature works correctly and meets the specifications, once it's deployed in production.
• Defining usage metrics to investigate whether their feature actually solves the originally identified problem, once it has been in production long enough to be tested by users.

Which companies recruit Product Owners?

Tech companies building a constantly evolving digital and technical product with very regular iterations (every 2 to 4 weeks).

Why do companies need this role?

The PO role allows a company to organize a team's work around a tech project in an agile way. It enables a functional product to be delivered very quickly and evolved with continuous value delivery.

What happens if the company can't recruit this profile?

• Their impact on the business is critical because they are literally the pivot point of a project, ensuring the link between the requester's needs and the design and development teams.
• Their product vision and frequent test-and-iterate methods let the business try new solutions while constantly reorienting toward what delivers expected results.

Who does the product owner work with?

The Product Owner primarily collaborates with UX/UI Designers. They work hand in hand, gathering needs together and defining the project's roadmap together based on the overall user journey, to make sure sprints always head in the right direction: that of the user's need.

They also work with back-end and front-end developers: they are both the one who brings them work and the one who supports them during development. Their role is to make sure they head in the right direction relative to the specifications and mockups they received.

Finally, they collaborate with the Product Manager, who is often their manager and with whom they will work to build the roadmap and put in place the working framework for the product and/or technical team.

Internal stakeholders / external clients: to gather needs and propose solutions to validate at sprint kickoff, then present at sprint end.

Scrum Master who will coach the teams on running sprints smoothly.

What is their role in the team?

Understanding and embodying end-user needs as best as possible is the Product Owner's main role. To do this, they work on the discovery phase, where they try to understand the project's various problems through surveys, interviews, data analysis, or workshops.

Coordinating the functional and visual design phase for the user need they specified, supporting UX/UI designers in producing mockups for the feature that addresses that need.

Launching the tech team on developing the feature as soon as it's ready to be implemented. The PO must validate the topic's priority beforehand, in line with the roadmap.

Ensuring the feature works correctly and meets the specifications, once it's deployed in production.

Defining usage metrics to investigate whether their feature actually solves the originally identified problem, once it has been in production long enough to be tested by users.

They will protect their team and make sure the project runs smoothly.

What technical problems does the product owner solve?

The PO isn't really a tech role, even though they sit at the heart of the project. They coordinate, structure, and prioritize tasks to regularly deliver value to the product.

What are the product owner's skills?

The Product Owner's main skill is knowledge of product management, whether in discovery, build, or grow phases. To this end, knowledge of Agile methodology and command of certain project management tools are necessary.

The Product Owner must also master the fundamentals of tech-related challenges as well as those of UX/UI to best support designers and developers day to day.

What are a PO's soft skills?

The Product Owner must be diplomatic and a strong communicator because they constantly engage with people of very different profiles and may sometimes have to mediate between two groups with different goals or needs.

Solid teaching ability or the capacity to explain things simply is also necessary because the PO regularly has to walk team members through a problem to solve and must make sure everyone has truly understood it.

Strong organization skills and a good team spirit are of course key to coordinating the project and the team's work.

What technologies do they use?

In the same vein, they don't use technologies but rather tools and methods:

Methods:

• Agile
• Scrum
• Kanban
• Lean Startup
• Feature Driven Development

Tools:

• Trello
• Jira
• Asana

What training is needed to become a product owner?

The Product Owner is still a recent profession, so there are few standard training paths. To build solid foundations in project management, one can train at an engineering school, then learn agile methods.

Many Product Owners are former technical project managers whose role is fairly similar in purpose but quite different in methodology. Some POs are also former developers who transitioned.

What is the salary of a product owner?

Compensation varies by years of experience in the role. The salary of a junior Product Owner (less than 3 years of experience) starts at 32,000€ gross annual. A senior Product Owner with more than 5 years of experience can expect a salary up to 65,000€ gross annual.

What career paths are possible?

Once the Product Owner has mastered their role, has a clear vision of their project and team, they have the shoulders to become a Product Manager and extend that vision to several teams.