Product Owner Support

1. Product Owner Support

   While the Product Owner role remains singular, the notion of involving additional people to support the PO has gained traction for challenging product backlogs or where a remote team may have limited interaction with the PO. This concept has been acknowledged by industry associations such as Scrum.org, which notes that POs may choose to "delegate responsibility to others".

   In Pentalog, we provide Product Owner Support by assigning a local PO profile to assist the main PO with specific tasks. Generally, this means embracing the product vision and roadmap defined by the PO and working on specific tasks to define and elaborate backlog items in line with this vision and in support of the roadmap. With time and proper context, clients often ask our PO support profiles to assume the full list of PO responsibilities by upgrading to our Product Ownership service.

2. Accelerated Backlog Refinement

   With Product Owner Support, the PO delegates responsibility for refining and elaborating discrete backlog items to a PO support profile typically located alongside a remote development team. Under these circumstances, the backlog is managed in a manner consistent with a customary PO model, but with an extra pair of "product owner hands" to speed backlog delivery.

   • The product backlog represents an ordered list of items (features, changes and bugs) needed to achieve the product goal and characterizes the “single source of work” to be completed by the team.
   • The Product Owner collaborates with stakeholders to elicit, refine and prioritize backlog items, an emergent process which continues along the entire product life cycle. Products no longer require a backlog only when they are retired.
   • The backlog should be refined “just enough” such that items at the top – those to be worked in the next 2-3 sprints – are fully elaborated, while items below may be less refined and may require significant work to be made “ready.”