Purpose
The Product Owner is accountable for maximising the value of the platform (product) through the work of the Scrum team. This includes defining and communicating clear platform goals, maintaining a transparent and prioritised backlog, aligning stakeholders, and driving continuous improvement while focusing on platform (product) development (not operational support). The Product Owner also ensures that prioritisation is evidence-based by defining desired outcomes, tracking adoption and value metrics, and using insights to adjust direction and trade-offs.
The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.
The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes:
- Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal
- Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items
- Ordering Product Backlog items
- Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood
The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.
For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions. These decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog, and through the inspectable Increment at the Sprint Review.
The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the needs of many stakeholders in the Product Backlog. Those wanting to change the Product Backlog can do so by trying to convince the Product Owner.
Responsibilities
At DMG Events our products are our company platforms. These platforms have been defined to be aligned with the core business functions to include all of the technology that is required for each function to operate effectively.
In this role I am responsible for…
- Maximize platform value: Be accountable for optimizing the overall value delivered by the Scrum team's work on the platform, ensuring efforts align with high-impact business outcomes.
- Set platform vision: Establish and sustain a strong vision for the platform to inspire long-term development and alignment.
- Communicate platform goals: Develop and clearly share the platform's application and platform goals to guide the team and stakeholders toward a unified direction. Before anything gets built, the Product Owner sets a clear vision, working with stakeholders, users, and leadership to define what the platform should achieve.
- Prioritize input from stakeholders and end users: Gather feedback from marketing, sales, customer support, and actual users, and turn that input into platform decisions.
- Create backlog items: Develop and articulate platform backlog items to define actionable work that advances the platform.
- Define acceptance criteria: Specify clear, testable criteria for backlog items to confirm when features meet requirements and are ready for release.
- Prioritize backlog: Order platform backlog items to focus efforts on the most valuable features first; maintain backlog transparency so it is visible and easily understood by all involved parties.
- Use JIRA for backlog: Keep the entire platform backlog maintained within JIRA to centralise tracking and collaboration.
- Manage stakeholders: Gather diverse perspectives from stakeholders and translate their needs into precise platform requirements to bridge business and technical gaps.
- Create and refine requirements: Develop and iterate on platform requirements to ensure they are detailed, feasible, and aligned with objectives.
- Align business and tech: Ensure business goals match technical capabilities, with support from the development team, to enable realistic implementation.
- Communicate with stakeholders: Facilitate effective dialogue with all stakeholders, including Platform Owners, to foster understanding and buy-in.
- Liaise between teams: Serve as the connector between the development team and stakeholders to resolve issues and maintain smooth information flow.
- Manage super user groups: Oversee platform super user groups to gather insights and ensure key users are empowered and informed.
- Participate in agile ceremonies: Join sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives, and stand-ups to clarify priorities, provide feedback, and enhance team alignment.
- Build and manage roadmap: Create and oversee the platform roadmap to outline future development and strategic priorities.
- Own update communications: Handle platform-specific communications about roadmaps, feature releases, and user impacts to keep everyone informed.
- Own the platform applications and application lifecycle plan: Platforms encompass officially recognised applications (owned and managed by Technology) and shadow IT (applications adopted by the business outside of Technology governance). The Product Owner maintains visibility across both categories and ensures all applications — regardless of ownership — are accounted for in roadmap planning and lifecycle management decisions.
- Handle risk management and forecasting: Identify potential risks (e.g., dependencies or market changes) and forecast timelines/budgets to mitigate issues and set realistic expectations.
- Plan go-to-market strategies: Develop and support launch plans, including coordination with business teams for training, pricing, and promotion, to ensure successful feature rollouts.
- Maintain documentation: Keep end-user documentation current and accurate to support usability and maintenance.
- Review and accept completed work: Actively review completed increments against defined acceptance criteria; formally accept work that meets objectives and delivers intended value, or reject it — treating rejection as an opportunity to refine the original request, enhance requirements, and re-prioritise or re-scope to prevent future misalignment.
- Stay current on trends: Monitor new industry trends and strategies to incorporate innovative ideas into the platform.
- Improve processes: Continuously seek ways to enhance processes and achieve efficiencies to streamline operations.
- Solve platform problems: Address platform-related issues (excluding support) and make decisions to keep progress aligned with business goals.
- Review solutions: Evaluate potential solutions with business and development teams to select the best options for implementation.
- Gather customer feedback: Collect and integrate end-user or customer input (e.g., via surveys or analytics) to validate features and drive iterations.
- Monitor metrics and KPIs: Define, track, and report on performance indicators (e.g., user adoption, ROI) to measure success and inform priorities.
Decisions
In this role I take decisions on:
- Platform backlog prioritisation and ordering of backlog items
- Acceptance or rejection of completed sprint increments against defined acceptance criteria
- Platform vision, goals, and roadmap direction
- Product Goal definition and communication to the team
- Application lifecycle decisions across officially recognised applications and shadow IT within the platform
- Go-to-market and rollout planning for platform feature releases
- Definition and maintenance of acceptance criteria for backlog items
- Business stakeholders and Platform Owners — on sprint commitments, backlog priorities, and requirements alignment
- Engineering Lead — on technical scope, feasibility, effort estimates, and delivery timelines
- Scrum Master — on sprint planning, backlog refinement, and ceremony effectiveness
- Other Product Owners — on cross-platform dependencies and shared roadmap sequencing
- Finance, Compliance, Risk and Security — on scope, requirements, and constraints relating to regulations, risk, finance, and security
- Director of Delivery — on strategic alignment, increment planning, and escalated prioritisation conflicts
Recurring tasks
In this role I take care of:
- Effective Platform Backlog Management, including developing and communicating Platform Goals, creating and ordering Platform Backlog items, and ensuring the backlog is transparent, visible and understood
- Ensuring the backlog is broken down appropriately (Epics with T-shirt sizes, Stories with story points)
- Ensuring Platform Backlog items have all appropriate functional and non-functional requirements
- Epic, Feature and User Story acceptance
- Platform Roadmap creation, Increment and Release Plan management
- Setting of OKRs for the platform
- Sprint planning, sprint review, sprint retrospective, daily stand-up, and backlog refinement participation
- Regular stakeholder communication on roadmap updates, feature releases, and platform progress
- Super user group management and engagement
- Application lifecycle catalogue maintenance (platform applications and shadow IT visibility)
- Ensuring operational support processes are in place when increments are shipped
- ROI and KPI monitoring for platform features
- End of each sprint: ensure sprint review, retrospective and sprint planning are held, and that a sprint report is created for the sprint and presented to Platform Owners.
- Bi-weekly: hold a sprint review and planning alignment session with Platform Owners and relevant stakeholders to summarise what was committed, delivered, de-scoped or not completed.
- Monthly: hold a roadmap and backlog review with Platform Owners to confirm priorities, features in progress and work planned for the next three sprints.
- Quarterly: run quarterly planning and sign-off with Platform Owners to review the previous quarter and agree the work to be delivered in the next quarter.
- Ongoing: keep Jira roadmap and Jira Projects updated so they accurately reflect agreed priorities, delivery status and planned work.
Key Relationships
- Director of Delivery (line manager and strategic alignment)
- Engineering Lead (technical scope, feasibility, and delivery planning)
- Scrum Master (sprint ceremonies, backlog refinement, and impediment removal)
- Business stakeholders and Platform Owners (requirements, priorities, and feedback)
- Other Product Owners (cross-platform dependencies and shared roadmap sequencing)
- Head of Support / Support Team Lead (support readiness for shipped increments)
- Director of Data (data requirements and platform data governance)
- Executive Steering Committee (approval of new initiatives and strategic roadmap)
- End users and customers (feedback, adoption tracking, and feature validation)
- Platform vendors and suppliers (where relevant to roadmap delivery or application lifecycle)
Approach to decision-making
My approach to decision-making is centred on maximising the value delivered by the platform whilst maintaining a clear, evidence-based rationale for every prioritisation choice. When reviewing what to build next, I weigh business value, strategic alignment, user needs, and delivery capacity — and I am transparent about the trade-offs involved.
For acceptance decisions, I hold a high but fair bar: I formally accept work that genuinely meets the agreed acceptance criteria and delivers intended value, and I treat rejection as an improvement tool rather than a failure — using it to sharpen requirements and prevent future misalignment.
When stakeholders push for competing priorities, I facilitate alignment rather than avoiding conflict. I consult with Finance, Compliance, Risk, and Security on constrained decisions, and escalate cross-platform prioritisation conflicts to the Director of Delivery and Executive Steering Committee where needed. I make decisions that I can defend with data, user insight, and strategic rationale.