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Product Owner question

Last post 06:36 pm March 9, 2018 by Ian Mitchell
4 replies
04:14 pm March 8, 2018

Hi team,

   I have a question. We currently have a sharepoint in our company, and we have a product owner who sets the vision for that, and sablishes standares and the like. We also have some large projects to implement new sharepoints (7 months projects). Our question is, who should be the real product owner? Definitively there will be in each project someone from the business side with the authority to handle the requirements and be the decision maker for the new sharepoint, so I believe it should be the product owner of the project, but then this person should somehow be aligned with the product owner of the platform? It might be more a semantic question, but I'd like to see other opinions. Thank you!


09:00 am March 9, 2018

What does a product owner of the platform do? Could be treated as an important, but still "just" a stakeholder and/or developer?


10:22 am March 9, 2018

A product owner ought to be able to maximize the value of the product.

Who has a clear understanding of product value in this case, and can manage a Product Backlog for its optimization? Can this person represent the interests of stakeholders to Development Teams and be accountable to all for product success?


01:24 pm March 9, 2018

Well, the product owner of the whole sharepoint decides what projects are executed, the order of them, the vision, etc. However, for the different small projects within Sharepoint we have these stakehodlers who manage the backlog and defines the requirements specifics for that project.

So it could be that one is the product owner of the plataform and then product owner of the different projects or something like that?


06:36 pm March 9, 2018

I'd suggest that the focus be put upon Product Owners, and not to obfuscate matters with projects and their supposed owners. There should be a single Product Backlog for each product, by means of which all product requirements can be accounted for.

It's possible for a Product Owner to delegate some of his or her actions for managing a Product Backlog to others, but the PO would always remain accountable for the value delivered.


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