Product owners have a vital role in the production and product-management functions at many companies. They keep careful track of a product’s backlog and work with the team to determine which tasks must be performed in what order to complete production. If that wasn’t enough, they’re also tasked with constantly reminding the team of the end user’s needs vis-à-vis the final product.
Which skills do product owners need to succeed in this role? Let’s break down what it takes to become a successful product manager, including analytical skill, communication skill, the ability to work with scrum teams, and a deep understanding of the development process.
Necessary product owner skills
Agile and Scrum are core to the product owner’s job, and thus key skills to learn. Agile is a philosophy of how to build software, as put forth in the original Agile Manifesto. Agile rests on 12 principles as established in the Manifesto, including:
- Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.
- Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months).
- Close, daily cooperation between executives and developers.
- Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted.
- Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location).
- Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.
- Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
- Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
- Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly.
Agile emphasizes iterative development, team transparency, short feedback loops, and a focus on quality. It’s birthed a series of project management systems, most notably Scrum, which is a specific set of processes centered on multiple small tasks/sprints. Scrum is based on “three pillars of empiricism”:
- Adaptation (changing as circumstances demand)
- Transparency (know everything that’s going on)
- Inspection (check your work and establish good feedback loops)
Familiarity with Kanban (which centers on the Kanban Board, a very visual way of representing project flows). Kanban allows product owners (and others) to quickly identify redundant or nonfuctional parts of a team’s workflow, hopefully fixing things quickly.
For product owners in any industry, “soft skills” are also critical. These include:
Analysis: A product owner must understand customers and what the team needs to prioritize. Depending on the stage in the product lifecycle, they may also have to analyze the product’s impact (or lack thereof) on the open market.
Empathy: A good product owner puts themselves in the customer’s shoes to determine what they really need; they’re also good at listening to team members and other stakeholders about their concerns.
Project Management: Although project managers will actually handle workflow in many organizations, product owners need to have a keen awareness of how to manage a project and ensure all deadlines are met within budget and resource constraints.
Storytelling: Product owners must accurately and effectively convey the product’s “story” to customers and stakeholders (this is also known as product vision). A compelling story can ensure a proper amount of buy-in from the organization, making storytelling an essential skill.
Leadership: Product owners are in a bit of an odd position: they might not directly manage many team members, but they must nonetheless use their empathy, emotional intelligence, and leadership skills to rally the team to get things done.
Technical Skills: Depending on the product, company, and industry, a product owner must have the technical skills necessary to grasp what’s being worked on, and whether the current workflow is successful in the context of ultimate goals.
How do I include my skills in a product owner resume?
A product owner resume should put your skills in the best possible light (check out the Dice template for such a resume at the link). Emphasize your ability to work with Agile and all its offshoots; show off how your previous product owner experience allowed products to succeed despite challenges.
“You also want to identify an excellent understanding of the business and the industry on which you're focusing your resume,” Josh Drew, Robert Half Regional Director, recently told Dice. “Clarify that you understand the competition, market trends and customer needs and how you articulate that back into the product design.”
As with resumes for other tech roles, always consult the original job posting and note the skills mentioned there; make sure to include any of those skills you’ve mastered in your final resume. This is because automated resume scanners will check for those skills/keywords, and potentially eliminate any application that doesn’t include them.
In addition, you’ll want to use your experience section to emphasize your:
- Amazing stakeholder communication abilities
- User-centric design skills
- Prioritization of backlog items
If and when you make it to the product owner interview, be prepared to discuss your skills in greater detail; you’ll want to come prepared with stories about how you used your product owner abilities in ways that allowed companies to achieve their goals and left customers happy.
What do product owners earn?
According to Glassdoor, which crowdsources its compensation data from across the United States, the average product owner makes $134,346 per year, once you include salary, bonus, and other potential benefits. That aligns with crowdsourced data presented by other job-centric websites such as Indeed and Builtin.
That’s quite a bit, especially when you consider how the average tech pro makes roughly $111,348 per year, according to the most recent edition of the Dice Tech Salary Report.
