A Product Owner (PO) is an important member of an Agile team who is responsible for ensuring that the revenue growth rate outpaces the cost growth rate of the product he/she manages, so this position includes generating hypotheses to improve user experience, research, insights, metrics analysis and control, and full sprint management to ensure accomplish the highest priority tasks.
The role of the product owner has crucial connections and responsibilities not only inside the local team, but also outside the team. It includes working with Product Managers, Business Owners, Customers and other stakeholders.
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Let’s discuss the responsibilities of a Product Owner in order to get an in-depth understanding -
Responsibilities:
The PO has the following responsibilities:
Preparation and participation in PI planning
- As a member of the extended Product Management team, the Product Owner is ardently involved in refining the backlogs and preparing for PI (Program Increment) Planning and plays an integral role in the planning exercise itself. Just before this task, the Product owner usually scrutinizes all the Backlogs which are there in the team and provides fruitful input on the program concept, Roadmap, and presentation content.
- During the event, the Product Owner participates in the definition of the Stories, providing the mandatory clarifications to assist the team with the effective evaluation of the Stories and the order in which they will be implemented. The Agile team, along with its member POs, collaborates with each other to define team goals for the upcoming Program Increment (PI).
Executing an Iteration
- Maintaining the Team Backlog - The most significant responsibility of a Product Owner is the formation, modification and maintenance of the Team Backlog. These Backlog items are prioritized on the basis of user value, time, and other team dependencies figured out during PI planning and refined during PI implementation.
- Iteration Planning - The Product Owner re-analyses and realign the backlog, including coordinating dependencies with other POs. During Iteration Planning, the PO talks about the story details and priorities within the team and ensures team consent of the final Iteration plan.
- Timely development of Stories - The majority of the Backlog items are developed in the format of user stories. This can happen at any time before the beginning of an Iteration, during the planning of an Iteration, or during an Iteration. Any team member is free to develop Stories and their Criteria for Done, but the responsibility of the PO is to maintain the proper flow of this work.
- Applying BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) - Product Owners collaborate with their team to detail Stories with Done Criteria and examples in the form of Acceptance Tests.
- Story Acceptance - The RO works with the team to agree on an acceptable way to complete the Story. This includes checking that it has appropriate ongoing acceptance tests and that it otherwise meets the Readiness Criteria. At the same time, the Product Owner also provides a certain level of quality, focusing primarily on suitability for use.
- Understanding the operation of the Enabler - Although Product Owners are not expected to manage tech solutions, they should acknowledge the scope of the work ahead of the Enabler and collaborate with the System Architect/Engineer to assist with decision making and sequencing of the critical technological infrastructures that will enable the new business -functionality. This is often best achieved by setting load balancing.
- Team Demonstration and Retrospective Participation - POs collaborate with their team and any other stakeholders in a team demonstration. They also participate in the Iteration Retrospective, where teams meet to improve their processes, and actively participate in the Inspect and Adapt (I&A ) Agile Release Train (ART) session.
Execution of the Program
- Iterations and Agile teams serve an important purpose: frequent, reliable, and continuous release of value-added solutions. During each PI, the Product Owner coordinates dependencies with other POs. This often happens during weekly PO Sync events.
- The PO also plays an integral role in preparing the System Demo for program stakeholders and the Value Stream.
Inspection and Adaptation
- The teams solve their toughest problems at the Inspection & Adaptation meeting. There, the PO works with teams to identify and implement improvement stories that will increase the speed and quality of the Program.
- The PI System Demo is part of the I&A meeting. The Product Owner plays a significant role in organizing and conducting the PI System Demonstration for Program stakeholders.
- To ensure that the most important aspects of the solution are shown to stakeholders, Product Owners also participate in the preparation of the PI System Demonstration.
Composition of powers
SAFe® uses a gamut of factors such as Features, Stories, Non-Functional Requirements, Design Artefacts, and much more to guide ART during solution creation. The Program Backlog and the Team Backlog prioritize these work items. The Product Manager and the Product Owner manage the Backlogs and their priorities. This collaboration works most effectively when using Design Thinking and Continuous Learning tools such as Personas, Empathy Maps, Customer Journey Maps, Story Maps, which bring discoveries and more understanding.
The following are guidelines for separating responsibilities between these roles. Depending on the size and architecture of the solution (and to some extent the culture of the organization), authority can become more decentralized, shifting to the right. For example, stable Agile teams that become more aware of customer issues and the context of the solution are able to contribute directly to Features and Stories to drive the product.
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Lean thinking is a type of business methodology that is designed to provide a way to think about how to organize the human activities for delivering more profits to the society and worth to the individuals in the elimination of waste. The main motive of lean thinking is to form a lean enterprise that will sustain growth by supporting customer satisfaction along with employee satisfaction. This serves innovative products or services profitably by reducing the needless costs to customers, suppliers and the environment. Lean thinking helps the individuals in identifying the wasted time and efforts on their job and even better way to work together for improving the processes by eliminating these wastes. Through this, the enterprise will be able to deliver more results at lesser expenses while developing the employee's confidence, competence and the ability to work with the others.
5 principles that will include your workplace efficiency are:
Defining Value:
For understanding the first principle you have to understand what value is. Value is nothing but the amount the customer is ready to pay for. It is vital to find out the actual need of the customers. sometimes it may happen the customer may not know what they are looking for. This takes place especially when it comes to novel products and technologies. There are many procedures to find out what the customer is looking for through interviews, surveys, demographic information, and web analytics. By making use of these qualitative and quantitative techniques you will be able to discover what is the need of the customer and what the customers want and how they want the products or services to get delivered and the price they proposed.
Map the value streams:
The second important principle is identifying and mapping the Value stream. Here, the aim is to make use of the customer’s value as a reference point and identifying the activities which contribute to these values. Those products that do not add value to the end customers are considered waste. These wastes are broken down into two groups: one is the non-value added but necessary and the other non-value added but unnecessary. The former needs to be reduced as much as possible but the latter is a complete waste and should be deleted. By eliminating the unnecessary waste processes or steps you will be able to make sure that the customers are getting exactly what they want and the cost of producing the product and services also reduces.
Creating flow:
Well, after the removal of the wastes from the value streams following actions are taken to make sure that the flow of the remaining steps runs smoothly without any interruption or delays. Some of the strategies for value-adding activities flow effortlessly involves breaking down steps, leveling out the workload, reconfiguring the production steps, forming the cross-functional departments and coaching the employees to be multi-skilled and adaptive.
Create Pull:
The main aim of the pull-based system is limiting the inventory as well as work in process items that ensure that the requisite materials and information are all available for the smoother flow of work. On the other hand, a pull-based system helps in on-time delivery and manufacture where the products are created on time which is needed and in quantities required. The pull-based system is crafted out of the need of the end customers. By following the value streams, you will make sure that the product which is produced will be able to meet the demands of the customers.
Pursuing Perfection:
By following the first four steps you will be able to prevent wastes. Last but not the least Pursuing perfection is one of the important steps among all the other. Moreover, it makes the lean thinking and continuous process as a part of the organizational culture. Every employee needs to strive towards perfection while delivering the products that are based on the need of the customer. Thus, the company must be a learning organization and should always seek something better every day.
Conclusion:
With the introduction of the Agile methodology, there is a drastic change in the work process. Lean thinking helps the organization in its growth by removing waste. Lean helps the manager by finding out the inefficiencies and delivering the best value to the customers. Thus, this helps in forming an efficient and effective organization. Moreover, the principles help in crafting the proper flow of work process as well as developing improvement in the culture.
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