The product owner role from a stakeholder perspective: expected responsibilities and skills in practise

A product owner in a scrum team faces numerous responsibilities. While in traditional software development methodologies stakeholder management is distributed amongst different roles (such as a project manager, product manager or line managers), in scrum the management of stakeholders and their expectations is the product owner's sole responsibility. While the product owner responsibilities and stakeholders are debated from a theoretical perspective in the first part of this research, an interpretive case study makes use of the stakeholder theory to analyse stakeholders and the expectations they have towards the product owner at an agile financial software provider. Based on twelve in-depth interviews with different stakeholders within the organisation and the client, several findings regarding the expectations stakeholders have towards a product owner were found. The findings show that the interviewed stakeholders expect the product owner to carry out 19 different responsibilities, have 19 soft skills and personal characteristics, have had training in 7 hard skills as well as have previous (work-) experience in three areas. However, on closer inspection some of the expected responsibilities partly stand in conflict with the product owner role according to the scrum methodology.