Responsibilities and Challenges of Product Owners at Spotify - An Exploratory Case Study

Kristinsdóttir, Sigurhanna; Lárusdóttir, Marta; Cajander, Åsa

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-44902-9_1

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…They described Product Owner as a very difficult role since the Product Owner's success depends on many factors such as organizational culture, project type, management approach, and the interaction within the team that is developing the product. A case study at Spotify was done by Kristinsdottir et al [39], focusing on the Product Owners' responsibilities and challenges. There was no explicit agreement among the interviewees on the actual daily responsibilities, as there were many tasks to juggle each day.…”

Section: Product Owner Rolementioning

confidence: 99%

“…There was no explicit agreement among the interviewees on the actual daily responsibilities, as there were many tasks to juggle each day. "Some respondents commented that they needed to have one foot in the daily work and one foot in the future and lead people to work on the right things at any given moment" [39] (p. 13). The study confirmed that Product Owner is a complex role with both inward-and outward-facing responsibilities.…”

Section: Product Owner Rolementioning

confidence: 99%

“…(TA6) Lead people [39] No There was no description found prescribing this kind of activity of PO in SAFe. The PO accepts the iteration increments in the form of stories by validating acceptance criteria, assuring a level of quality and fitness for use.…”

Section: Generic Concept Of the Product Owner Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Product Owner’s Journey to SAFe®—Role Changes in Scaled Agile Framework®

Remta

Buchalcevova

2021

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As agile software development methods are spreading through the industry, they are no longer sufficient in their original design. With the increasing adoption by various types and sizes of organizations, these methods are scaled and tailored. The most popular framework for scaling Agile is the Scaled Agile Framework®, registered trademark of Scaled Agile, Inc. Boulder, USA. Some roles originating from the agile methods, such as Product Owner, are part of the framework and are impacted by scaling and tailoring. A Product Owner role is critical to the success of projects in agile environments. This paper aims to describe and discuss the evolution of and changes in Product Owner activities since Agile started to spread in the industry until the current concept of the Product Owner role in the Scaled Agile Framework. By identifying the activities typical of Product Owners outside of the Scaled Agile Framework context and mapping these activities to the Product Owner role description in Scaled Agile Framework, the changes in Product Owner role with respect to time and role specifics in the Scaled Agile Framework are revealed. It was identified that some of the activities previously described for Product Owner are distributed between various roles in the Scaled Agile Framework. In fact, the Product Owner loses the real product ownership in Scaled Agile Framework. The loss of ownership seems connected with the fact that, in the large environments that the Scaled Agile Framework is designed for, it is impossible to cover all required activities by one role using the hierarchical structures with a top-down approach in the Scaled Agile Framework.

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Section: Product Owner Rolementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Product Owner Rolementioning

confidence: 99%

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Product Owner’s Journey to SAFe®—Role Changes in Scaled Agile Framework®

Remta

Buchalcevova

2021

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“…Although Scrum teams are mentioned several times by scholars, team dynamics have rarely been the focus of an investigation. Rather than within the team, the research looked into the relationship between the team and the stakeholders, such as the Product Owner [20], and across teams [21].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Theory of Scrum Team Effectiveness

Verwijs¹,

Russo²

2021

Preprint

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Scrum teams are the most important drivers to lead an Agile project to its success. Nevertheless, a theory, which is able to explain its dynamics is still missing. Therefore, we performed a seven-year-long investigation where we first induced a theoretical model through thirteen field studies. Based on such a model, we developed a customized and validated survey tool and collected data from almost 1.200 Scrum teams. Data have been subsequently analyzed with Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling. Results suggest a very good fit of the empirical data in our theoretical model (CF I = 0.952, RM SEA = 0.041, SRM R = 0.037). Accordingly, this research allowed us to (1) propose and validate a theory for effective Scrum teams, (2) formulate clear recommendations for how organizations can better support Scrum teams.

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“…Several researcher identified communication to be of particular importance in the development process (cf. previous studies [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] ). However, we did not find a publication investigating the communication of Product Owners in detail.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Product Owners communicators? A multi‐method research approach to provide a more comprehensive picture of Product Owners in practice

Unger‐Windeler

Klünder

Reuscher

et al. 2020

J Software Evolu Process

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Product Owners have an important role in the agile and hybrid software development process. While this role is supposed to maximize the value of a product, there seem to be several scattered results on how they achieve this, as well as what actually constitutes this role in practice. To consolidate current research results and to further analyze the key attribute of Product Owners, we conducted a multi-method research approach spanning a systematic mapping study and a consecutive case study in a hybrid development environment. The results of the mapping study states that Product Owners are communicators. We further investigated on this and used the shadowing technique to observe three Product Owners' communication activities. The results support that statement, as the gained data reveal that Product Owners spend 65% of their time in meetings. But rather than just providing the team with the necessary requirements for the product under development, Product Owners need this time to synchronize and align their work, streamline the agile process of large-scale Scrum, discuss team-based topics, and to solve upcoming issues addressed by the team. These results contribute to draw a more comprehensive picture of the important but yet complex role of Product Owners in practice.

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Responsibilities and Challenges of Product Owners at Spotify - An Exploratory Case Study

Cited by 16 publications

References 11 publications

Product Owner’s Journey to SAFe®—Role Changes in Scaled Agile Framework®

Product Owner’s Journey to SAFe®—Role Changes in Scaled Agile Framework®

A Theory of Scrum Team Effectiveness

Are Product Owners communicators? A multi‐method research approach to provide a more comprehensive picture of Product Owners in practice

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