The Agile trend is here to stay with the buzz words of project management like Scrum, Agile, Scrum Master, and the Product Owner. Around 97% of all the organizations have been applying Agile practices with roles like the Product Owner, Development Team, and the servant leader – The Scrum Master.

Let’s look into the product owner’s role and expectations at a high level:

1. Individual or Individuals? The Product Owner is an Individual probably an SME who knows what is being built and what the customer’s needs are. Product owners are the voice of the customer. There can’t be multiple product owners for a development team.
2. Pseudo Stakeholder / Business Many times, Product Owners are the pseudo stakeholders who are there to guide the team to understand the business need, hence their understanding of process/work flow needs to be impeccable.
3. Contributes to Vision and Strategy Product Owner borrows the vision and strategy from the senior leadership and contributes by working with the team to achieve the vision, strategy can be modified based on the need.
4. Assist the team A Product Owner is expected to add value in user journey mapping, create process and work flow charts, epics, and user stories to aid the development team. They also help the team to prioritize the work. e.g. Adding a screen print or wireframe always helps !

Please let me know if I missed anything.

Video by Henrik Kniberg PO in a nutshell