“Agile methodologies are not just a framework but a change in perspective away from traditional methodologies”
Talking about Scrum, which is one of the most used agile frameworks nowadays, we often hear about the Scrum Team and the Scrum Master both being the building blocks of the Scrum framework. Indeed, they are important, but I would like to highlight the importance of the Product Owner (PO) role for an agile project to be successful. The PO is a key variable in the equation, and here is why:
Product Owners are professionals who have all the business acumen of any given company’s vertical, product, or service. It They don’t need to be tech-savvy people, but it is important that they have a full understanding of your business domain. Their main responsibility in an agile team is to maximize the ROI (Return on Investment) produced by the team. For this, the POs strive to have a healthy backlog of user stories (requirements in Scrum) that the team can implement. They also have the final word in approving or rejecting the team’s delivery. Here’s the key difference between agile and traditional methodologies: in traditional, you bring the requirements to the team and then wait until the final implementation to perform the user acceptance testing, as opposed to agile methodologies, where the approach is to do it iteratively and incrementally, and here the key is the involvement of the PO within the team on a daily basis from the user stories refinement, implementation, deployment, testing, and final approval.
