First, we all should know why do we need a product owner? Cant a product be successful without a product owner?
So to answer this, let us assume we have a baseline product, how do we go ahead with it. We need customers who can use this product isn’t it? And how do we get customers? It is the marketing/sales department who will publish our product and try to attract customers in the market.
Marketing person documents all his/her market research about the product which is called “Product Concepts”.’ and hands over to Product Managers. Now, this Product Concept documentation becomes the base document of a Product Manager, He will study the product concept document and come up with a SOR Document.
You must be wondering what this SOR is? So SOR is Scope Of Requirement document, sometimes also called as SOW- Scope of Work document, which brings together everything from work details, to schedules, terms of the customer, and expected outcomes by a customer, etc.
This document helps to define exactly what should be done on a project.
Now this SOR/SOW document will be handed over to project managers and the managers will forward the same to the development team. And from there the development team starts working?
Is that the RIGHT way to do it? According to me NO, because in this situation there is no single person responsible for the product as the product is in the hand of a development team which may have many developers in it, and this results in a difference in product vision, the difference in opinion about how the product should be. That’s where the need for a single point of contact to create a winning product comes into the picture, The name for this role who fits in between the Market, The product management, the developers are called Product Owner.
What is good about this role is, having a product owner for a product will make sure everyone has the same vision of the product and no shared vision of what the product should do.