Responsibilities and Challenges of Product Owners at Spotify - An Exploratory Case Study
In Scrum, the Product Owner (PO) role is crucial for the team to be successful in developing useful and usable software. The PO has many responsibilities and challenges, including being the link between customers, other stakeholders and their development
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Kolibri, Reykjavik, Iceland [email protected] Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland [email protected] 3 Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden [email protected]
Abstract. In Scrum, the Product Owner (PO) role is crucial for the team to be successful in developing useful and usable software. The PO has many respon‐ sibilities and challenges, including being the link between customers, other stake‐ holders and their development teams. This exploratory case study conducted at the software development company Spotify focuses on POs three responsibilities: (a) Identification of customers, (b) Estimation of value of their teams’ work and c) Forming a vision for the product. Additionally, challenges perceived by the POs are studied. Data was gathered through five interviews and on site observa‐ tions. Results show that the POs activities are divided between daily work, such as making sure that their teams are functional and long-term activities such as making a vision for the product. The main challenge of the POs is to inspire and encourage team members to collaborate and communicate within the team and with stakeholders. Keywords: Project management · Product management · Agile · Agile methods · Scrum · Product Owner (PO) · Software development
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Introduction
Traditional project management approaches for software development, like the waterfall approach, have been challenged by Agile approaches in recent years [2]. Agile is an umbrella term for project management approaches such as Scrum, XP, and Kanban [21], where Scrum is the most widely adopted Agile approach [25]. Scrum is an approach with a few ceremonies, roles and artefacts. The roles are called: Product Owner (PO), Scrum Master (SM) and Team Member (TM) [20]. Management responsibilities are divided among these three roles [19]. Pichler describes the PO role as a new, multi-faced role that unites authority and responsibility that traditionally, in the traditional processes was scattered across separate roles such as customer, product manager and project manager [15]. Hence, when using Agile approaches the PO role in some aspects replaces the role of various stakeholders. The PO has the authority to set goals and shape the vision of a product and therefore the PO has other responsibilities © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved C. Bogdan et al. (Eds.): HCSE 2016/HESSD 2016, LNCS 9856, pp. 3–16, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44902-9_1
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S. Kristinsdottir et al.
than the project manager that mainly writes requirements and does prioritization for the team [15]. For example, the POs in Scrum projects in Iceland had various responsibilities [23]. The proportion of the POs time collaborating with the team varied from 5 % to 70 % of their total working time. Furthermore, the POs used from 10 % to 50 % of their working time collaborating with customers, users and other stakeholders [23]. The Product Owner role has not had much focus in academic researc
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