The Product Owner

The product owner is he who defines the product, the product line, and the product road map.

If the project team lives in the current project and solves the current problem statements, then the product owner lives in the future and defines the next challenge statements for the product line.

He owns both the continuous improvement process and the innovative breakthrough process of his product line.

It is his product line that competes against the competitors’ in the market place through functionality, characteristics, quality, cost, …

It is he who disrupts the marketplace through incorporating new technologies in the product.

And it is he who orders technology research to the ARC for his product line.

The below picture shows some of the sources where he gets his inputs from:

He is partially guided by the main engineering guiding principles:

And finally, it must be said that, although the product ownership is certainly a team ownership of the given product line, yet there still must be an individual product owner who acts as the first among equals in the product line team. In this sense, perhaps it is better to call him the "Product Leader" instead of the "Product Owner".

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