Who is responsible for the business value delivered by a scrum team?

The product owner is someone who has an in-depth knowledge about business needs for the product being delivered. The product owner has to be an individual as the decision making power cannot be given to a team. If there is a team of stakeholders that helps the product owner, the final decision making power should lie with the product owner.

The product owner is responsible for creating and maintaining the product backlog. A product backlog is an entry place for all the tasks that are supposed to be finished to develop the product. Anyone from any department, Sales, Customer Service and even the developers can give their inputs to create the backlog. What Product owner does is, gather all their requests and start prioritizing them depending on the importance and impact on the business. It may happen that some of the tasks never get completed as they will be given low priority and if the product owner thinks that they do not add much value to the business.

The product owner has to cooperate with development team and help them by answering domain related questions. It is always recommended that client’s should be fully engaged before indulging in any development work.  Communication with product owner is very much required otherwise you would be fooling yourself whether or not the product that you are working on is the one that client wants.

Another job that a product owner has to do is to set business priorities for development work. Also needs to make sure that the ROI is high. If the development no longer adds to the business, it is the duty of product owner to put an end to it. The product owner also sets milestones. Then the development team discuss these milestone it with the product owner to make him aware of the feasibility of the milestones.  By feasibility, I mean whether the given task can be completed in the set time frame. The product owner also sets the release dates.  

Last but not the least, writing user stories to capture requirements.  As the name says, a user story tells a story about a customer or user employing the product. The acceptance criteria are used to define how others will know if the story has been fulfilled. However, it is the product owner’s job to create user story keeping return on investment in mind therefore prioritizing the same in product backlog.

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Other Resources:http://www.scrumstudy.com/why-get-scrum-certified.asp
http://www.scrumstudy.com/why-scrum.asp
http://www.scrumstudy.com/scrum-increases-ROI.asp