It’s been over a month since my last post (I’ll write later about my busyness and my blog plans heading into the fall) but I wanted to share some brief thoughts today. I’ve been thinking a lot about the roles of Product Manager and Product Owner in my firm and thought I would post a bit about the Product Owner role.

At the company where I work, the role we call Product Owner aligns fairly closely with what other companies call a Scrum Master. And for the person in this role, the most important meeting they have every day is scrum. This daily time with the development team is crucial for four reasons:

1. It allows the Product Owner to see real-time sprint progress and have a clear view on whether the team will deliver the planned functionality at the end of the sprint.
2. The daily scrum offers an avenue for understanding how new features are being tested so that the Product Owner can help the team concentrate on the most relevant expected use cases for what is being built.
3. It surfaces any questions that the team has about what they are building or any roadblocks they have encountered so that the Product Owner can answer these questions or help overcome the obstacles.
4. The daily scrum gives the Product Owner a venue for sharing new things learned from users of the product, the support and implementation teams, or from market feedback – providing valuable insight into potential areas for enhancing the product in the future.

I’ve written before about how important it is in general for a good Product Owner to be available to the development team because questions can come up at various times throughout a day or week. The daily scrum is not the only venue for this interaction, but it is crucial enough that it should be a high priority meeting for any Product Owner to attend.