What Is a Product Owner, and How Do I Become One?

A product owner plays a significant role in companies that follow a Scrum process for project management for the release of new products. In Scrum, self-managing and cross-functional teams aim to deliver services in a short cycle. In this role, you help guide the product through the product backlog and its entire lifecycle, ensuring it remains on track, visible to all stakeholders, and helpful for the organization and end users. 

Does this career intrigue you? Explore it further to learn more about a product owner's responsibilities, job outlook, salary, and how to become one.

Read more: Agile vs. Scrum: How to Choose the Best Method

What does a product owner do?

A product owner manages product life cycles—ideation through launch—ensuring the product offers the client maximum value at every stage. In this role, you'll wear many hats throughout the development process, serving as a business strategist, stakeholder liaison, team morale booster, and more. Your job will also require collaboration with various departments, as you will work with marketing, design, and other teams to ensure the product aligns with the business’s objectives. 

As a product owner, you’ll do the following tasks:

• Define the product vision

• Manage the product backlog

• Develop a roadmap

• Create product goals and priorities

• Communicate progress to stakeholders

You may often end up juggling several priorities from various stakeholders simultaneously. Ultimately, you will manage these competing priorities and ensure you meet goals on time and within scope. 

Read more: The 3 Scrum Roles and Responsibilities Explained

Duties and responsibilities of a product owner 

Product owners have a broad range of duties and responsibilities; the following six are critical to the role. Explore them in more detail below. 

1. Vision

The product owner maintains a clear vision for the company's products and communicates it to the team, stakeholders, and customers. You’ll also seek feedback from the organization to ensure the vision aligns with the business needs and adapt if needed.

2. Collaboration

The product owner role also requires frequent collaboration with stakeholders and other teams in and out of the organization. During this collaboration, defining product goals and analyzing client needs is essential to ensure you obtain input from these different stakeholders and teams. You’ll also collaborate with your team frequently to manage the backlog and ensure the project is on schedule and within scope. 

3. Customer focus

As a product owner, you’ll constantly remain focused on the customer and help other team members understand the customer’s needs and pain points. You will seek out feedback from the customer and represent them. 

4. Decision-making

Decision-making skills help the team quickly get the product to market. Comprehensive product knowledge, including its marketing value, revenue, current performance, cost, customer sentiment, and technical state, helps facilitate this fast decision-making.

5. Experimentation

Experimentation for a product owner may involve stating a hypothesis or running a series of A/B tests to make your work more free-flowing and experimental. It allows you to adapt to change and encourage innovation. 

6. Influence

A product owner may not necessarily have authority, but one related power you will have is influence. A product owner’s influence helps get stakeholders on board with all aspects of the product. Once stakeholders align, the authority falls into place.

Skills of a product owner

Product owners use various technical skills to complete their roles, including programming and analysis. Some technical skills you may find helpful in your product owner career include:

• User stories

• Coding

• Software development

• Design

• Analytics

• Agile framework

• Jira

• Acceptance criteria

• Backlog management

Keep in mind that this role goes well beyond just technical skills. You’ll also need essential workplace skills to be successful, such as:

• Communicating clearly

• Making fast and wise decisions

• Collaborating with various teams to reach a common goal

• Leading your team to a successful product launch

Is a product owner the same as a product manager?

Within the Scrum framework, the duties of product owners and managers can vary significantly between organizations, but in general, a product manager has a more strategic and senior role than a product owner. 

Generally, product managers outline and develop the product management process through a product’s lifecycle. You'll have larger organizational goals in mind and build strategic roadmaps to meet these goals. Product managers supervise and oversee the product management process, analyze the market, forecast profit and loss, and perform other business-focused tasks. 

Product owners, however, have a more tactical role and focus primarily on short-term fulfillment. In this position, you’ll help maximize product value by generating customer stories the team will use to make user-led product development decisions. The product owner also manages the backlog and all the actionable steps involved in clearing this backlog.

The product owner is a part of the Scrum team but not the leader. As the product owner, you will focus on providing feedback and guidance to the Scrum team to help them do their job more effectively. You will also collaborate with developers, engineers, and others on the team. 

Read more: What Is PLM? Product Lifecycle Management Career Guide

Career outlook for a product owner

A product owner's role is similar to that of a market research analyst, a field that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects to grow by 13 percent between 2022 and 2032 [1]. This rate is much faster than the average occupation growth in the US. 

Product owner salary

According to Glassdoor, a product owner in the US earns an average salary of $105,721 [2]. However, this salary can vary on several factors, including years of experience. On average, entry-level product owners with a year or less of experience earn $83,933 annually, and average pay typically increases at the following rates [2]:

• 1–3 years of experience: $95,617 

• 4–6 years of experience: $105,208

• 7–9 years of experience: $115,704

• 10–14 years of experience: $130,414

• 15 or more years of experience: $140,721 

How to become a product owner 

To become a product owner, you will need to gain training, seek out certifications specific to Scrum and your industry, network with colleagues and associates, gain practical experience, and possibly work with a mentor.

Training and certification

Becoming a product owner starts with completing your education. Since this is a technical career, you’ll typically need at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science, business, or a related field. 

After gaining the required education, you’ll want to focus on learning the Agile development process and gain Scrum training. Organizations seeking product owners often use these workflows, and you’ll benefit from understanding them. 

As you work toward becoming a product owner, you may also want to earn certifications that prove your understanding of the critical functions of this role. Some certifications to consider include: 

• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)

• PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)

• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)

• Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I)

• Project Management Professional (PMP)

• Certified SAFe Product Owner

• Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP)

Read more: 10 PMI Certifications to Level Up Your Project Management Career

Networking

By networking with others in the field, you can inspire one another and build long-standing relationships that may open future career doors. It can also help you gain new knowledge and insight into the industry, which can help further your career even more. You can lean into your network to share ideas and get feedback before presenting them to your organization or team. You can also gain exposure to new approaches through networking with like-minded product owners with differing opinions that you can apply to your product. You can build your network through industry events, social media, professional networking sites, and more. 

Read more: 9 Networking Tips to Expand and Strengthen Your Network

Experience

To become a product owner, you will generally need eight to 10 years of job experience in related roles, according to Zippia [3]. Some roles where you can gain this experience include business analyst and project manager, but others may also apply. Once you’ve gained this experience, highlight it on your resume to show you understand what the job entails and are ready to succeed. 

Mentorship

Mentorship can also help in your product owner career. Mentors can offer you one-on-one career advice and relevant training and hold you accountable, preparing you to take on more advanced products and grow professionally. You also learn from their past mistakes and successes and leverage their more extensive network. 

Getting started with Coursera

Product owners are professionals who help manage a product through its lifecycle as part of a Scrum-style team. A career as a product owner can be rewarding and fast-moving. If this sounds interesting, consider the Google Project Management: Professional Certificate and IBM’s Introduction to Agile Development and Scrum courses on Coursera. These courses can help you get a better feel for the Agile development process you’ll likely use as a product owner.