If you have a product owner on your team, what are their general responsibilities? What are the main skills that make your product owner successful?

A product owner is the team's bridge to stakeholders, ensuring everyone’s vision aligns with customer needs and business goals. They prioritize work in the product backlog, make tough calls on trade-offs, and keep everyone focused on delivering value. Key to their success is clear communication, strategic thinking, and a strong customer focus. They understand the product's technical aspects enough to make informed decisions, adapt quickly when priorities shift, and advocate for features that improve user experience. With these skills, they guide the team to create impactful, user-centered products.

We take a very active role in product ownership, adopting a "mini CEO" mindset. Our product owners are accountable for the business success of their part of the product. They ensure that the features being developed are not only functional but also contribute to the product's success in the market. They are responsible for sequencing the roadmap, collaborating with engineering, and making strategic decisions about which features to build next.

We do have product owners for all our products. Their primary role involves understanding business use cases and customer expectations, then translating those into business requirements. They prioritize these requirements, breaking them down into work items, and collaborate closely with engineering to ensure these are implemented correctly. While they may not have deep technical knowledge, they focus on operational feasibility and the overall shaping of the product. Successful product owners engage in constant communication with engineering leadership and customer-facing roles, discuss reusability, follow a planned approach, and remain available to the engineering team.