The product owner (PO) plays a crucial role in an agile team. They are responsible for maximizing the product value delivered through the engineering effort. As a customer advocate, the PO defines and prioritizes the team backlog and clarifies product goals and roadmaps. But some things are not in the PO’s remit. For the deeper technical requirements of a product, the PO requires technical assistance to get things right. Generally, technical leaders support them in such cases. This works well in small-size development projects, but it gets complicated when your product grows fast and the number of agile teams increases. Teams face many issues: more new and complex features, more dependencies, increasing technical debt, essential architecture changes, increasing deployment frequency, etc. Someone has to take ownership of the technical side of product development. For that reason, another vital role emerges called Technical Product Owner.
Let’s dig deeper into the details of the role and define why they are essential for product development and the teams’ success.