Jory MacKay on October 29, 2025 What does a product owner do (and how to be a good one)
Product owners are the key liaison between users, business stakeholders, and the development team. This is a mission critical role that is central to a product’s strategy, roadmap, and success.
Unfortunately, the product owner role is often confused with other similar delivery roles, such as project manager, program manager, and product manager.
If you’re new to the product owner role, or you’re thinking of hiring one in your organization, then this article is for you.
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What does a product owner do?
A product owner is accountable for maximizing the value of a product. As the liaison between users, business stakeholders, and the development team, the product owner communicates the product’s vision and goal, acts as the champion of the product’s users, and prioritizes the work of the development team.
According to Scrum Guide best practices, the product owner role should be held by a single person, not a committee.
That individual controls and prioritizes the product backlog, and therefore has the authority to make decisions on behalf of the organization.
But, it’s important to remember that the Scrum Guide definition of a product owner was designed for teams who religiously follow the Scrum framework.
While the responsibilities are fairly consistent, the day-to-day duties of a product owner often vary from organization to organization.
For example, for a small product, alongside more tactical tasks, the Product Owner may also be responsible for strategic activities such as defining the product strategy, managing budgets, and creating business cases. When a product is large and multifaceted, those responsibilities may fall to a product manager instead (more on that later!)
As a general rule, here are the typical strategic and tactical responsibilities expected of a product owner:
| Strategic: | Tactical: |
|---|---|
| Define and champion the business case for products and features | Prioritize backlog items for upcoming sprints |
| Responsible for the product vision, strategy, and business plan | Define and document requirements and acceptance for product features |
| Responsible for product performance and revenue | Collaborate with the development team to answer queries |
| Define user strategy and marketing or engagement plans | Conduct user research and advocate for user’s needs in the development process |
| Manage senior stakeholders expectations and provide updates | Manage Agile ceremonies, such as product showcases and retrospectives |
| Manage budgets and resource plans | Accept work and manage release cycles |
| Accountable for decision-making, with a focus on driving maximum value | Facilitate decision-making with objective data, focused on value |
The most important skills for product owners to have
Regardless of the exact role and responsibilities, all good product owners need a common set of soft and hard skills.
Here are the top five most important ones to succeed:
- Communication. To share the product vision and user perspective with team members such as developers, designers, testers, and business representatives.
- Collaboration. To work effectively with the development and release management team to define, design, and release new features.
- Analytical Thinking & Problem-Solving. To understand technical problems, review data, and define complex requirements.
- Leadership. To inspire team members, make decisions, manage conflicts, and effectively communicate the product strategy.
- Product Knowledge. Gained over time, to better understand users, solution designs, acceptance criteria, and options analysis.
Running across the top of all of these responsibilities and skills, a product owner should constantly focus on delivering value — primarily to users, but also to the organization.
For example, when prioritizing backlog items, the focus should be prioritizing those with the most value, rather than the ones that are cheapest or fastest to deliver.
Product owner vs. Product manager
The product owner and product manager roles frequently get confused. This is understandable, as many organizations define the roles differently, and sometimes even merge them into one.
But most commonly, the differentiation between a product owner and a product manager is based on who carries out the strategic and tactical activities. Where the roles are split:
- A product owner manages the tactical execution of the product strategy, breaking it down into objectives and delivering new features through an Agile software development framework, such as Scrum.
- A product manager focuses on the long-term strategy, vision, and roadmap for a product, while also managing budgets, business cases, and resource plans.
Does every team need a product owner and a product manager?
Put simply, no they don’t — it often depends on the size, scale, and complexity of the product and how much there is to do. Let’s look at an example.
Imagine you’re working on a mobile app for an e-commerce brand. If the app is small, with 30 products, and 1,000 monthly customers, a single person could probably manage the strategic and tactical elements of the product development.
But, if it was a large e-commerce app, with 3,000 products and 100,000 monthly customers, you’ll likely need multiple product owners to oversee changes for each part of the app. For example, one owner for product search, one for search results, and one for basket & checkout.
A product manager would work above these product owners, setting strategy, managing budgets, and providing line management support.
The product owner communicates the product’s vision and goal, acts as the champion of the product’s users, and prioritizes the work of the development team.
How to be the best product owner: 10 powerful tactics
The product owner role has been in place for well over 20 years. During that time, lots of best practices have emerged.
Outside the formal roles, responsibilities, and skills, here are some tactical things you can do to be a standout product owner for your company:
1. Get to know the market and USP of your product
The best product owners know their market and the unique selling proposition (USP) for their product inside out. This deep knowledge helps them define and prioritize the right features to deliver maximum value.
2. Use customer research and interviews to dig deeper into user needs
One of the biggest mistakes new product owners make is thinking they instinctively know what their users think (spoiler alert: they don’t!) Instead, the best product owners conduct regular user research, including interviews, surveys, and shadowing, to truly understand what’s important to users now and in the future.
3. Act as the voice of the user every single day
Once product owners know what the customer needs, they champion their opinion at every opportunity. This ensures maximum value is delivered for the user and helps product owners cut through the noise of internal company politics.
4. Practice quick and effective decision-making
In a fortnightly or monthly sprint cycle, there isn’t time to mess around. The best product owners are great decision makers, using data and objective analysis to choose solutions, remove bottlenecks, and support the development team to fix bugs.
5. Become a master of communication and negotiation
As the middleman between users, business, and development stakeholders, top product owners are master negotiators and influencers. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy all the time, so product owners have to also be great at managing trade-offs, communicating tough messages, and prioritizing the right things.
6. Embrace the unknown and learn through experimentation
Most products operate in a competitive market, with things changing daily. The best product owners are comfortable with ambiguity and aren’t afraid to experiment with a new feature, even if it doesn’t quite work out!
7. Make sure you’re regularly available to answer questions
The superpower of any good product owner is being available to support stakeholders and champion your product. Good self-management and acting as a servant leader ensures you’re always available to collaborate and keep the development cycle moving forwards.
8. Know the metrics you need to influence
Whether it’s active users, churn rate, annual recurring revenue, or Agile development metrics such as velocity, digital products have many quantifiable metrics to track. The best product owners know which metrics are most important for their company, and keep them front and center when making key decisions.
9. Understand where the product owner role fits in your organization
Top best product owners know exactly what their roles and responsibilities are. With so much variability across different companies and sectors, being crystal clear on what being a product owner means in your organization is key to success.
10. Use tools to help manage the product development process
The product owner role is a big one that can’t be done from a traditional to-do list. The best product owners use tools like Planio to manage their tasks, features, bugs, and sprint plans all in one place, creating a central space to collaborate, store documents, track metrics, and ultimately, keep the product roadmap on track.
Planio makes it easy to track tasks, groom and schedule backlog tasks, communicate with your team and share knowledge. You can even try Planio with your own team free for 30 days (with no credit card required!)
What a product owner shouldn’t be doing
On the flip side, there are many things that new product owners end up doing that they really shouldn’t be.
Accidentally falling into other roles reduces a product owner’s value, causing features to become delayed or misaligned from your strategy.
Here are some of the common things product owners shouldn’t fall into doing within their day-to-day role:
- Getting stuck in the weeds of writing user stories. While a product owner plays a key role in defining, ordering, and prioritizing user stories, they shouldn’t be the ones to fill in all the details. This is often done by a Business Analyst or Tech Lead, freeing up the product owner for other activities.
- Adding everyone’s ideas to the product backlog. A product’s backlog is a sacred place. Not every idea needs to be, or even should be, added to it. Using an idea validation method, good product owners should test an idea before formally adding it to the backlog.
- Falling into the role of project manager. The role of product owner and project manager often get mixed up, but they’re very different. Product owners shouldn’t spend all their time planning timelines, identifying risks, and managing budgets. Sure, they need to set timing and cost expectations, but it shouldn’t become their main role.
- Spending too much time as a subject-matter expert (SME). There’s a fine line between good product knowledge and being an SME. Sometimes product owners get dragged too far the other way. The best product owners bring SMEs into team discussions to shape solutions and solve problems, rather than try to do it all themselves.
- Taking over as team manager. While product owners have a natural leadership role, generally, they aren’t line managers to the development team — and nor should they be. Product owners shouldn’t be involved in HR processes, or directly responsible for personal development, discipline, or personal administration.
- Writing lines of code. While all the best product owners have technical knowledge, they should not be writing code for new features. If your product owner is spending time coding, they aren’t adding maximum value for users or the business.
All of these roles and tasks take away from the important work that a product owner should be doing.
The product owner role has a blend of business and technical focus, working to communicate, collaborate, prioritize, and approve work that drives the product strategy forwards.
Anything that takes away from that, slows down the entire product development process, eroding the value of the product, and eventually, impacting your competitive advantage, user satisfaction, and revenue.
Anything that takes away from the product owner role, slows down the entire product development process.
The bottom line: Product owners should focus on value
The product owner is an essential part of the product development process, contributing to building awesome products that users love. But the role is often misunderstood and confused with other jobs such as project manager, program manager, and product manager.
This isn’t helped by the fact that the product owner role often varies from organization-to-organization.
When you strip back the different job descriptions, every product owner is ultimately accountable for maximizing the value of a digital product.
From this, you can craft a product owner job description that works for your organization, ensuring you have a point of contact between your users, business stakeholders, and development team, that champions your product and ensures it delivers maximum value.
But remember, all the best product owners use tools to help them define, plan, and deliver their product roadmaps — and Planio is one of the best on the market. With features for agile project delivery, task management, collaboration, chat, document storage, and development repositories, Planio is the perfect tool for building great products that your users will love!
Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)
