Strategic product owner

…collaborative product discovery of a large product or product portfolio in a complex and layered organization.

✣  ✣  ✣

The work is simply too much for a single product owner. Finding or training a good product owner is hard and expensive.

Arlen Bankston explains: strategic product owners (a.k.a. Agile Product Managers) focus on iterative product management:

• Manage competing stakeholders
• Create strategic product vision for multi-team execution
• Make program- and Release-level prioritization decisions
• One per project or product family
• Focus on Marketing Strategy and Strategic Planning
• Spends most time in the field, facing customers and stakeholders, away from the office
• Product vision and features, sales process, tools & collateral
• Defining market opportunities
• Customer acquisition & retention
• Product pricing & marketing strategy development

Both strategic product owner and tactical product owner can be distinguished, yet are inseparable—you need both for successful collaborative product discovery.

Therefore:

Split the single product owner into a strategic product owner and tactical product owner. For successful collaborative product discovery distinguish between but do not separate these mutually reinforcing roles.

✣  ✣  ✣

Sometimes, these roles are named chief product owner and product owner.

✣  ✣  ✣

---