Strategic product owner
…collaborative product discovery of a large product or product portfolio in a complex and layered organization.
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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.
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Sometimes, these roles are named chief product owner and product owner.
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