Purpose
The Platform Owner is a business-side role that acts as the primary liaison between their division or event teams and the Technology platform team. The Platform Owner is not a member of the Technology team — they are a business representative who ensures that the needs, priorities, and feedback of their division are accurately understood by the Product Owner and, where relevant, reflected in the platform backlog.
The Platform Owner has three core responsibilities: gathering and consolidating stakeholder feedback from within their division and event teams and sharing it with the Product Owner; communicating technology updates, roadmap decisions, and release information back to those same business stakeholders; and providing a prioritised, stack-ranked view of their division's needs to inform backlog decisions within their assigned platform.
Responsibilities
- Act as the single point of contact for stakeholder feedback within their division or event team, ensuring that business needs, issues, and ideas are captured accurately and consistently.
- Proactively gather feedback from divisional teams and event teams on the platform — including pain points, unmet needs, feature requests, and operational issues — and consolidate this into clear, structured input for the Product Owner.
- Ensure that feedback shared with the Product Owner is representative of the division's genuine priorities, not just the loudest voices, by actively engaging a broad range of stakeholders.
- Maintain ongoing dialogue with key business stakeholders to stay informed of changes in divisional needs, upcoming events, or shifts in priorities that may impact the platform backlog.
- Participate in Platform Owner meetings, providing vision and priorities, clarifying requirements, and ensuring alignment with divisional strategic goals.
- Serve as the outbound communications channel from the Technology team back to the division and event teams — sharing updates on roadmap progress, upcoming releases, platform changes, and known issues in a timely and accessible way.
- Translate technical updates into language that is meaningful and actionable for business stakeholders, ensuring that the division understands what is changing, when, and what it means for them.
- Manage communications around release impacts, including coordination with the division on training, process changes, or preparation required ahead of new platform features going live.
- Ensure that communications to the division are consistent with what the Product Owner and Technology team are communicating, avoiding conflicting messages or misaligned expectations.
- Escalate any communication gaps or misalignments to the Product Owner promptly to prevent confusion or mismanaged expectations within the business.
- Provide the Product Owner with a clear, stack-ranked view of the division's priorities for their own platform — ensuring the Technology team understands which requests and improvements matter most to the business.
- Prioritisation input is scoped strictly to the Platform Owner's own platform. They do not have authority to prioritise or de-prioritise work on other platforms, and do not seek to influence cross-platform sequencing decisions.
- Review and refresh prioritisation regularly — particularly ahead of sprint planning, backlog refinement, and increment planning — to ensure the ranked list reflects current divisional needs rather than historical preferences.
- Be prepared to articulate the business rationale behind prioritisation decisions, helping the Product Owner understand the value and urgency of specific requests.
- Accept that final backlog sequencing decisions rest with the Product Owner, who will balance divisional input against technical capacity, dependencies, and broader platform strategy.
Decisions
In this role I take decisions on:
- Which feedback from my division is significant enough to escalate to the Product Owner
- Stack ranking of my division's requirements within my own platform
- The timing, format, and content of communications shared back to divisional stakeholders
- Which divisional stakeholders to engage for feedback and how frequently
- Product Owner — on backlog prioritisation, requirements clarity, release readiness, and sprint outcomes
- Divisional / Business Leadership — on which business needs and priorities should be elevated to the platform team
Recurring tasks
In this role I take care of:
- Regular Platform Owner meeting attendance and active participation
- Ongoing feedback collection from divisional teams and event teams
- Maintaining and refreshing the platform priority stack rank ahead of sprint planning and backlog refinement
- Communicating technology roadmap updates, release notes, and platform changes to the division
- Increment Planning participation — providing divisional vision, priorities, and requirements clarity
- Coordinating divisional readiness for upcoming platform releases (training, process changes, awareness)
Key Relationships
- Divisional leadership and business teams (primary stakeholders represented by this role)
- Event teams within the division (key source of operational feedback and requirements)
- Other Platform Owners (shared context where cross-platform impacts affect the division)
- Product Owner (primary Technology counterpart — backlog input, requirements, and sprint communication)
- Director of Delivery (escalation and strategic alignment)
- Scrum Master (ceremony participation and communications support)
Approach to decision-making
My approach to decision-making is centred on representing my division's genuine needs accurately and fairly — not advocating for individual stakeholders or personal preferences. When consolidating feedback, I seek broad input and aim to present the Product Owner with a clear, evidence-based picture of what the division actually needs, not just what is loudest or most recent.
For prioritisation decisions, I rank based on business impact, urgency, and strategic alignment within my platform. I am transparent about my rationale and I accept that the Product Owner will weigh my input alongside technical constraints and the wider platform backlog.
When communicating back to the business, I ensure accuracy and consistency — I do not speculate on timelines or scope beyond what the Technology team has confirmed, and I escalate any gaps or misalignments immediately rather than making assumptions on the team's behalf.