Product Owners

The introduction of personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s fueled the growth of software development teams, which used a variety of approaches to create software. The most-successful frameworks—such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, feature-driven development, extreme programming, dynamic systems development method, and test-driven development—were adopted by many developers and companies

In February 2001, 17 software development and testing practitioners wrote the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The term Agile was selected because it effectively conveyed the need for nimbleness, speed, and flexibility in the development process. The origin of the Scrum framework is often tied to “The New New Product Development Game,” a 1986 article by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the Harvard Business Review. Takeuchi and Nonaka described a rugby approach to product development where “the product development process emerges from the constant interaction of a hand-picked, multidisciplinary team whose members work together from start to finish.”

Today, Scrum is the most-popular framework. In this framework, there are Scrum team members, who perform the everyday development tasks; Scrum masters, who teach, train, and inspire Scrum teams; and product owners, who lead the team and are solely responsible for its successes and failures. In recent years, some companies have named two or more product owners to work with Scrum teams because projects are so large or otherwise demanding. Each product owner manages one aspect of the project, with a senior product owner tasked with authority over the entire project.