Negosentro.com | Why can being CSPO certified make you the Product Owner expert everybody wants?
A lot of companies start their product development by creating a plan, rallying resources in the forms of developers, testers, analysts, and the like and letting a single project manager take care of them all. After investing enough time and a huge amount of money to make the project a success, the results are barely describable.
Why does this happen? Well, companies have begun realizing their fallacy and it lies in an outdated methodology of taking care of software products. With a talented team of resources who are great at their job roles, a person required to lead and guide them shouldn’t be a manager. It should be someone who understands the technical perspectives of the project, as well as make sense of the business needs at the same time.
This is precisely what a CSPO course prepares you for. By being a Certified Scrum Product Owner®, there are tons of responsibilities that you can fulfil and make the lifecycle of a product’s agile development a success. Here are some of those.
1. Supervising the sprint progress
When we say supervision, we don’t mean the same managerial perspective again and throwing metrics at the team to talk about progress. A Scrum Product Owner gets into the nitty-gritty and speedily makes decisions whether the deliverables produced by the team are acceptable or not.
This is combined with clear and concise communication with different team members, which helps them stay aligned with what’s expected of them and produce deliverables that can be accepted.
2. Realizing the product roadmap and vision
For most of the team members, the rationale behind creating the product and the company’s motivation as well as a vision for taking it ahead, continue to be words on a piece of paper. As long as they don’t connect with everyone, those words are not going to be the driving force they ought to be.
As a Scrum Product Owner, you achieve it both. By communicating with the stakeholders and customers, you are able to handle and distil the business aspects of the project. These are then broken down into simple and measurable terms, which the team can relate to and help provide insights in achieving those as well.
3. Creation of goals and milestones
Initiating work on a project can seem overwhelming when you don’t have a clear idea where you’re supposed to begin from. Every feature or functionality can seem critical and lead to chaotic and unplanned product building, adding to the risk of it being a failure.
Scrum Product Owners can see a product from every angle and are able to formulate a good path of creation. This includes planning the goals for each sprint and the milestones to hit in terms of functionality. Right from prioritizing the appropriate stories to owning the backlog, a Scrum Product Owner does it all.
4. Updating and evolving the progress in real-time
A product development timeline, even in the Agile world, is rarely as straight-forward as it seems. Stakeholders might come back with a revised approach, requiring other features to be prioritized all of a sudden. A feature development might hit a major roadblock, causing the sprint planning to go haywire.
The only person that can be relied upon in such realistic problematic situations is the Scrum Product Owner. They ensure that the stakeholders are clearly aware of the backlog priorities so that their decisions can be well-informed. In case of a revised approach, the Product Owner can think on their feet and revise priorities effectively or swap one feature with another, in order to maintain development sanity.
5. Keeping hopes and spirits high
With a Scrum Product Owner in place, the development team is free of the management tasks and can fully focus on the priorities at hand. The stakeholders are free from micro-managing and can relay their concerns to one person who can handle it all.
However, this can sometimes lead both parties to have a tunnel vision and fail to see the larger picture. Efforts might begin to seem redundant and leading nowhere. This is where a good Scrum Product Owner is able to infuse their passion for the entire process. They can liaise with the development team and fight for them so that their morale stays high. Similarly, the product owner can also create good vision statements and goals that help the stakeholders to stay positive about how product development is going on.
Contrary to popular opinion, a Scrum Product Owner is not a middle-man between the stakeholders and the development team. Any concerns regarding the functionality of the product can always be discussed freely without filters. It’s the larger role of managing the product development to be in line with changing business needs that the Scrum Product Owner takes charge of.
Get your CSPO training today and be the prized professional every organization would want to get their hands on.
