How Can I Start a Career as a Product Owner?

If you are passionate about solving problems, that’s your chance! The market has thousands of open positions for Product Owners.

The market has many opportunities for you who want to be a Product Owner. If you search for Product Owner positions on LinkedIn, you will find thousands of companies looking for them. If you love solving problems and helping teams build meaningful solutions, this role suits you very well.

If you want to start a career as a Product Owner, how can you become a relevant candidate? I don’t have a precise answer for you, but I can share some learnings from my experience to clarify what to do.

Be aware. The Product Owner role is often misunderstood.

Companies don’t have a shared understanding of what it means to be a Product Owner. You will find different expectations from each company. In my opinion, the Product Owner is the most misunderstood and complex role of Scrum. The reason is clear; Scrum is not enough to succeed as a Product Owner. You need more than Scrum to build meaningful products.

Being a Product Owner means you are the value maximizer for the customers and the business. But how you play the Product Owner role varies dramatically depending on your environment. Still, to be a Product Owner, you should understand the vital aspects of the role:

• Vision: Product Owners should bring challenges to the team and leave room for creativity. Don’t focus on setting features to deliver. Instead, focus on developing a vision to pursue. With a compelling vision, you put the team on a mission. Everyone knows why they go to work every day. The team engages because the purpose is clear.
• Be part of the team: the Product Owner is a peer to the Scrum Master and Developers. Scrum has no hierarchy. Product Owners are not managers. To succeed in this role, you should behave as a servant leader.
• Collaboration: it’s vital to collaborate intensively with everyone to build meaningful products. Although the Product Owner is accountable for the product, it doesn’t mean the Product Owner should decide everything alone. You have the final word, but you should learn how to use that power optimally.
• Outcome orientation: it’s essential to focus on generating value instead of only building features. At the end of each Sprint, Developers will create the increment, which refers to the output. It is your job as a Product Owner to measure the impact of the output. This is known as the outcome, and you cannot ignore it. Otherwise, you can’t evaluate if the Scrum Team is generating value for the customers and the business.

Complementing Scrum with Product Management

What’s the difference between Product Managers and Product Owners? I believe there’s no difference. For me, these are only titles. The job is the same. One person interacts between multiple spheres: UX, Tech, and Business. The goal is to lead teams to build products that solve customers’ real problems and generate value.

You can see the Product Manager as the job description, while the Product Owner is the Scrum role. But you should be careful; some companies opt to have both roles working together. In this case, the Product Owner won’t be the Scrum Product Owner. The role will be very similar to a business analyst. For example, on SAFe, the Product Owner has minimal responsibility compared to the Scrum Product Owner.

The title doesn’t matter, but being a single person is vital for this job. It’s indeed challenging to be this person. A vast responsibility is put on a single person. But that is the magic of this position. You are accountable for changing the status quo. You spend time making a real change instead of dealing with bureaucracy and processes.

As a Product Owner, you should learn how to do Scrum properly, but that won’t give you all you need to thrive. That’s why you have to acquire relevant knowledge of Product Management. For example:

• Validating hypothesis: we need to accept our ignorance. We don’t know what makes sense to build until we validate our assumptions with our end-users. We must gain clarity on what to build and what not to build.
• Measuring the results: how can we be sure we are on the right track? Every day we need to understand what is going on with our product. We need to measure the impact generated by our activities.
• Generating value: maximizing the value can be too abstract. To succeed, we must translate value into something concrete for our customers and businesses.

It’s impossible to be a great Product Owner without relevant Product Management knowledge.

How can you acquire Product Management knowledge? Let me give you some ideas:

• Books: Product Management in the digital world is still new. We don’t find many books about it, but here are some suggestions: Escaping from the build trap by Melissa Perri and Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan.
• Articles: you can gain different perspectives and benefit from the other’s experience. We have a lot of talented professionals sharing their experience in communities like Serious Scrum. You can also get many insights from the Silicon Valley Product Group.
• Meetups: exchanging knowledge and experience with product people will help you gain relevant insights. Also, you can understand what is really happening in the real world. An option to consider is the Product Tank meetup, but you can find many other meetups.

Is the tech background a must for Product Owners?

“Product Owners need a technical background” that’s no more than a myth. I’ve worked with great Product Owners who have no technical background. But they understand the technical aspects of the product.

As a Product Owner, you will spend at least 30% of your time talking to developers. If you don’t understand anything developers say, you have a problem. Frustration is inevitable.

Regardless of your background, you should understand how your product works behind the curtains. You don’t need to know how to code, but you may want to understand how software development works.

The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value from the work of the Scrum Team. That’s why some basic software engineering knowledge is beneficial. You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t need to be able to build an API or a micro-service, for example. But you need to understand what an API is used for.

Great Product Owners will:

• Help the Developers identify right-sized solutions for the problems. Therefore, avoiding waste by over-engineering.
• Understand why some solutions take longer to build than others.
• Ensure the Developmenters have a clear understanding of the problem to solve.
• Ensure the Developers don’t fall in love with the solution. The focus should always be on the problem.
• Facilitate trade-offs whenever needed. For example, should we build something scalable or something temporary?

The meaning of leadership for Product Owners

“If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, then, you are an excellent leader.”— DOLLY PARTON

Leadership is not a position. It’s a set of actions. As a Product Owner, you are not a manager but should act as a leader. Your actions should inspire teams to dream more. You should put them on a mission to achieve. You should inspire people around you.

To succeed as a Product Owner, you must learn different leadership roles. In some moments, your team wants you to call the shots. But sometimes, the team wants only advice from you. You should interpret the situation to identify which leadership style will lead to a more efficient result. I consider the following to be the most relevant competencies to learn:

• Facilitator: you have two tasks: identify conflicts, and bring them to the table. As the facilitator, you don’t make decisions, but you help people solve the conflicts to make the decisions.
• Consultant: people can use your knowledge to help them decide on something. However, you should not decide for the team; instead, you should provide relevant perspectives.
• Negotiator: trade-offs are often needed. As a negotiator, you identify the pros and cons of the options. Then, you can negotiate on what to do and what not to do. Once you have the goal in mind, negotiating won’t be a hassle.
• Leader: sometimes, people need guidance. As the Product Owner, you should be able to fulfill this need. Without a clear direction, the room for confusion is too big. Don’t overwhelm your teams with confusion; provide clear guidance to them.

Once you learn how to read the situation, you can apply the most appropriate situational leadership. You should make it transparent to the team. They will feel more comfortable if they understand which role you are playing and why.

“A star wants to see herself rise to the top. A leader wants to see those around her become stars.” — Simon Sinek

Rocking as a Product Owner

To become a successful Product Owner, you will have much work to do. You cannot thrive if you don’t put tons of effort into it. But you can use your time wisely and benefit from some shortcuts. If you want to rock as a Product Owner, you should:

• Acquire relevant knowledge of Product Management.
• Learn how to talk to developers so that you can build effective solutions.
• Understand the different leadership styles and when to apply each of them.
• Learn how to use different agile frameworks.
• Be part of a community passionate about building delightful products.