PRODUCT OWNERS

As product owners, you would need to have a high level understanding of business domain, software product, organization, product vision and product roadmap. Having skills required for the job include people management and sometimes project management. Similarly, having a technical understanding of concepts such as Micro Services, DevOps, Cloud Computing and Technical Debt is icing on the cake.

SKILLS REQUIRED FOR PRODUCT OWNERS

1. Product Vision
2. Product Roadmaps
3. Backlog Management
4. User Stories
5. Splitting & Merging Stories
6. Customer Collaboration
7. Liaison between Groups
8. Story Estimation Techniques
9. Story Prioritization Techniques
10. Business Domain
11. People Management
12. Diagrams & Documents
13. Requirements Gathering
14. Change Management
15. Understanding of Software
16. Knows Product very well
17. Good Stakeholder Management
18. Understands Technical Domain
19. Understands Business Terms
20. Knowledge of Process
21. Project Management
22. Stress Management
23. Provide Business Ideas
24. Able to Test the System
25. Understanding Users of Software
26. Customer Journeys
27. Critical Skills
28. Analytical Skills
29. Able to find Problems
30. Able to provide Solutions
31. Business Strategies
32. Business Objectives
33. Story Teller
34. Conflict Resolver
35. Effective Escalator
36. Understands Data Analytics
37. Understands UI/UX
38. Knowledge of Technical Debt
39. Emotional Intelligence
40. Knows Industry Competitors

IMPORTANT RESPONSIBILITY

Product owners are very important as they help organizations work on a software product that is actually an idea that needs to be translated into a source code using 100s of different libraries, services and technologies. Therefore, if POs are not very good at the job then software will have business features that are wrongly developed, not serving purpose, contain bugs, errors or problems.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Its not possible to be well versed in business domain, people management, project management, product, software development process and knowledge areas. Therefore, some core skills are business and people domain for sure that helps a product owner understand the issues or problems and discuss solutions with the client, business or customers.

Similarly, working on user stories, backlog and stakeholder management is equally important skill. If any skill can be ignored that can be understanding technical domain.