Enhance your effectiveness as a Product Owner by mastering key responsibilities and communication strategies. Ensure timely Sprint bookings, manage requirements clearly, and maintain regular updates on progress and costs while effectively triaging feedback and requests.
The client is generally the Product Owner (PO). They should read the Scrum Guide and watch the Product Owner video to understand their role. It is so important to the success of their project:
When working with a client-side Product Owner (PO), it’s crucial for the Scrum Master to come from the consultancy. Typically, the consultant Scrum Master has more experience in Agile and Scrum methodologies than the client PO. This experience can significantly impact the success of the project by providing essential guidance and support to the PO in their key responsibilities.
Without proper support, the PO might struggle with critical tasks like backlog management, prioritisation, and stakeholder communication, which can lead to misaligned expectations, missed deadlines, and reduced product quality.
Managing a backlog can quickly become overwhelming. It often grows into a long, messy list of user stories, bugs, and features. High-priority items get buried, duplicates sneak in, and new requests don't always come with clear next steps.
This is where AI can help. By connecting the GitHub or DevOps MCP to a host (eg. Claude Code), you can use natural language to query, refine, and prioritize your backlog — saving hours of manual effort.
Unless we're currently working on the last Sprint of the development, you should always book the next Sprint as soon as you start work on the current one.
Testing is a vital part of any development and can be quite time consuming, depending on the complexity of the application.
You WILL discover bugs in any newly developed software. This is perfectly normal. It's important to have a common understanding with your software developers about what to do when they arise.
There are lots of stakeholders in a software project. Users, Marketing, Managers, they all have requirements for the new system but if the spec becomes a free-for-all, it is more likely the project will be steered off-course.
Depending on how much visibility you need on ongoing costs, you will have to decide whether to use 1 or 2 week development iterations.
Some clients think that a Project Manager is just a resource that increases the cost of a project. But a house does not get built if you leave the architect, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers to just work it out between themselves. The house does get built if the foreman is keeping everyone on their toes, making sure they are doing their job.
Software teams often come with a Project Manager. You can do better than that by getting a Scrum Master.
When you're scoping the work to be completed, ensure you are as accurate as possible in your requirements.
Email has a bad name in business primarily because people don't treat email correctly. Email can be a vital tool to your company, and your software development project, but it has to be managed. Email should be an accurate record of requests, conversations, and decisions. Emails are legal documents and should be treated with the same care as any other correspondence with clients or employees. Email is also an extremely effective task tracking tool, and requests made by email should be treated with the same seriousness as Project Plans and other directives.
While working, you'll get loads of questions. Most software projects demands close interaction with the client. As the developers are usually working to tight budgets and schedules, getting quick answers to questions is a must. The Product Owner should be able to answer developer's questions within 4 hours. Otherwise decisions will be delayed and costs increase.
As a Product Owner, you are representing the product's stakeholders on the Scrum Team. You will be a representative of the product to other people in your business, such as your manager. You will often be asked the question "How is your product going?"
Often towards the end of a project, you may request extra pieces of functionality ("Can you add a second email address field into the Client Contact form?"), or maybe another report is required. Even in the middle of a project extra work can be requested as project goals move. So long as there isn't a technical or business problem with the request, the work will be scheduled by the developers and done.
If you have a tight schedule and deadline for the release, we need you to be clear with your developers right at the beginning about what needs to be done and when. Most developers generally can't guarantee they can work with your deadlines, but they'll be honest up front about when items can be completed.
At the beginning of a Sprint, the team will commit to getting a certain subset of the Backlog completed. This is only possible if they focus only on work that is in the Sprint.
No doubt there will be a time when you get new developers to work on an existing application. Known issues with the existing application should be clearly delineated as much as possible. But new bugs will occur when changes have unforeseen effects on functionality down the line. This is to be expected.
The shorter the time period between development and testing, the quicker and easier it will be to solve any issues identified during testing. When your developers provide you with a test version, have your resources available to review the version and get feedback to them straight away.
Acceptance Criteria (from the Product Owner) help to answer the question "How will I know when I'm done with this Product Backlog Item (PBI)?". It defines the exact requirements that must be met for the PBI to be completed. It is the Product Owner's responsibility to ensure that all Acceptance Criteria has been added - otherwise they should not expect that work to be done.
You're the one paying the bills, make sure you know where the costs are and how the project is progressing.
Insist on receiving these 3 reports in every Sprint Review meeting: