Work Snippets - The role of digital product owners

The role of digital product owners

In my work experience and from conversations with other digital product owner practitioners in other companies, we all 'sigh' and realise that few people understand the role or value-add of product owners, and give us the due respect.


A common mis-conception is that 'product owner' is a fancy term for good old 'project manager', and question the attempt by product owners to position product vs competitors or direct marketing and commercial efforts. In a lot of workplaces, there is a constant tug-of-war between UX (user experience) designers and product owners, both believing that they should control the product roadmap and product definition.

This kind of struggles or mis-conceptions come from the rather hazy definition of product owners' role. An outside observer may find the product owner managing the progress or meeting development deadline; at other times they may be testing out competitors' products and identifying features; other times they may be configuring marketing campaigns or SEO. It's very varied, almost impossible to pinpoint a 'typical day'.

I used to put product owners as 'trustee of the product', the main person who understands the product and purveys the desirable states for the product to be in, then sets out the corresponding actions. While this description helps to explain the wide scope of work, it failed to set out how product owners' work relate to/ separate from other participants in a product such as marketing, UX, commercial, engineering and project managers (scrum masters).

Upon deeper thought and recent experience in the workplace, a product owner should be viewed as the 'perspective definer of product'. At any given time, different stakeholders have different view on how a product should look like/ behave/ perform/ relate with other products/ position amongst competitors. A stakeholder may have a string of opinions that bleed beyond their own field of expertise (e.g. a marketer may have thoughts on the pricing schedule or user interface design), and importantly these different perspectives may either contradict each other, be based on incomplete understanding of the product's situation and challenges, or over-emphasise their own field's needs (e.g. engineers will want a product free from even minor technical bugs).

With opinions floating around, what should be THE PERSPECTIVE for the product? There needs to be ONE perspective which then set the direction of the product and the contribution required from different fields, so that the product is aided by their inputs instead of being torn apart. The last thing you want is for the marketing department to sell the product as a niche competitor, yet the UX designer decided to put a premium feel on it and the business expects its client base to be the mass public.

This is the job of a product owner - gathering the different perspectives and their drivers/motivations, gathering market info and internal data, forming a vision for the product, then generate THAT ONE PERSPECTIVE to unite efforts. A product owner thus needs to be knowledgeable about the product, have a view of the market, understand the company's priorities and corporate strategies, work well with different stakeholders, be able to assimilate new information, and be able to express the perspective back to stakeholders and help them move from their own perspective to this united perspective.

This is why product owners spend so much time in meetings and thinking, and also helping out on a multitude of tasks - from reading through T&Cs to expressing an opinion on technical architecture, and challenging UX on their designs - perspectives cannot just be expressed in words, they also need to be demonstrated; at the same time, the same perspective is subject to stakeholders' own interpretation and adjustments are needed to correct their interpretations. Hence all these involvements.