Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers

Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers contains the most frequently asked questions that you might face in an interview & this will help you competently crack the interview. A Scrum Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Development Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals. Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers will test your knowledge as a PO.

Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers – Part II: Click Here

Please read Agile Interview Questions and Answer for interview questions related to Agile Fundamentals. Scrum Interview Questions and Answer for interview questions related to Scrum Fundamentals.

Question: What is the difference between Project Manager, Product Owner, and Business Analysts?

Answer:

Product Managers are responsible for a product roadmap according to corporate strategy. The Project Manager is the person who must ensure that the scope of a project is delivered against the budget and time frames agreed upon. This requires the Project Manager to create plans, negotiate budgets, and resources, and track progress.

Product Owner is responsible for ensuring their product backlog is aligned to the roadmap. The Product Owner role is much wider in its scope and comes with a lot more responsibility including researching market trends to fill gaps with a new product. A product owner is responsible for a particular product and works to grow it right from its inception stage to maturity with a vision.

Business Analyst fills the gap between Product Owner and Developers and is a supporting role. In the Scrum framework only the Product Owner role is defined, rest two are kind of proxy roles. A business analyst would be responsible for a particular section of the product and would work towards its requirements or come up with ideas to improve or innovate the process pertaining to its scope.

Question: What are the Product Owner’s responsibilities?

Answer: The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. He/She

Creates and Maintains the Product Backlog showing visible progress toward forecast results and goals.
Prioritizes and sequences the Backlog according to business value as expressed by a roadmap and stakeholder needs.
Prepares for each sprint and release planning session by working with the team to elaborate Feature Stories into Minimal Marketable Features that deliver increments of value and User Stories that are appropriately sized for each sprint.
Conveys the Vision and Goals at the beginning of every Release and Sprint.
Represents customer and stakeholder interests. Engages and solicits their feedback to validate priorities and compromises.
Participates in daily stand-up Scrums, Sprint Planning Meetings, Sprint Reviews, and Retrospectives.
Accepts User Stories during the sprint to confirm implementation meets the intent of acceptance criteria.
Re-negotiates Sprint priorities and commitment when the team communicates new discoveries that impact the size or value of work.
Communicates status to stakeholders including the use of Visible Product Backlog for forecasting release content and dates.

Question: What are the few challenges associated with the Product Owner role?

Answer: The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. Sometimes this role is not considered seriously e.g. not having a full-time Product Owner per team. Few organizations fail to realize how challenging the role is and they overload the Product Owners with too many teams and backlogs.

Sometimes skills are not matched and training related to Product Ownership is not done. So Product Owner fails to understand the fundamental of the role which in turn is reflected in the performance of the team.

For the Product Owner to succeed, the entire organization must respect his or her decisions. The Product Owner’s decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog. No one can force the Development Team to work from a different set of requirements.

Apart from the above challenges, there are challenges related to the missing product roadmap, missing/unclear acceptance criteria, and changing priority during the sprint.

Question: What challenges are you looking for in this product owner position?

Answer: This question is to determine what are your expectation and what the organization is looking for from you in this job, and whether you would be a good fit for the position being hired for.

The best way to answer questions about the challenges you are seeking is to discuss how you would like to be able to effectively utilize your skills and experience if you were hired for the job.

You must describe a specific example of the challenges you had met and how did you overcome that situation. You highlight the goals you have achieved in the past.

Question: What is a product roadmap? How will you create or help in creating a Product roadmap?

Answer: The product roadmap provides a strategy and plans for product development. It’s driven by short and long-term company goals and communicates how and when the product will help achieve those goals. It reduces uncertainty about the future and keeps product teams focused on the highest priority product initiatives.

In addition, the roadmap helps product leaders communicate the product vision and strategy to senior executives, sales and marketing teams, and customers, and manage expectations about when significant product milestones will be completed. When stakeholders don’t feel heard or are uncertain about where the product is going, they may begin to doubt the strategy, which can lead to a toxic work environment. The product roadmap aligns the key stakeholders on product goals, strategy, and development timelines.

The product roadmap typically illustrates the following key elements:

Product strategy and goals
What products and features will be built
When those product features will be built
Who is responsible for building those products and features
“Themes” or high-level priorities

For a small organization the Product Owner might be directly involved in creating the roadmap however in a large organization, he would be someone whose input would be required.

Question: How would a Product Owner deal with uncooperative stakeholders?

Answer: The best (and perhaps the only) way to deal with uncooperative stakeholders is to win their confidence by engaging them through regular meetings and discussions and demonstrating the value of agile product development. If it still fails, the product owner should seek help from the sponsor. Also facilitating Workshops, training, events, etc to get participation from uncooperative stakeholders.

Question: What are the critical strengths of the Product Owner role?

Answer: The ability to be inclusive is important. The interviewer is looking for the Product Owner to share their understanding of the customer and their needs across the team. So the team is focused on solving the customer problems rather than simply delivering a set of epics or user stories.

The most important word for the Product Owner is “No”. Saying yes to features is quite easy and we’re all good at it. “what not to do” is what differentiates the Product Owner from the rest of the team and highlights their balanced understanding of the customer’s needs vs. their teams’ capacity.

A final strength is being a Storyteller, or in other words, a great communicator. Product Owner is a 360-degree role, communicating downward to the team, outward to organizational peers, and upward to customers and stakeholders. Solid Product Owners leverage the power of transparency in everything they do, but they don’t count on it solely to communicate their progress and impediments. They personally take on the role of Storyteller for their backlog, team, decision-making, and results.

Question: What skills & competencies should a Product Owner demonstrate?

Answer: Key skills of a Product Owner should be related to Communication, Commitment, Vision, Focus on functionality, Available, and People skills. The following Performing Competencies are needed to do the Product Owner’s job well:

Subject matter expertise and sufficient market knowledge to understand customer wants and needs.
Manage product backlogs with priority decisions that mitigate risk and maximize value while showing steady progress towards forecast results
Manages backlog content consistent with priorities agreed to with key stakeholders
Provides a visible forecast and notifies stakeholders of any significant changes in effort or risk
Create Feature and User Stories that represent “vertical slices” of value
Collaborates effectively with Scrum Master and Scrum Development Team
Engage both team and stakeholders to collaborate in release planning
Inspires commitment by communicating a clear vision, direction, purpose, and goal for each release and sprint
Approachable and available to team members to answer detailed questions about requirements
Understand and represent the interests of customers and stakeholders such as customer service, sales, development management, and executives
Engages and solicits their feedback to validate priorities and compromises
Constructive Conflict Resolution
Demand / assure accountability
Effective planning and forecasting in spite of the inevitable uncertainty and unknowns
Understands and applies Agile and Scrum principles and practices
Balances new feature delivery with high-quality software while minimizing the creation of additional technical debt for sustainable software development.

Question: How do you motivate your team?

Answer: Big part of the Product Owner’s role is to establish the mission and vision for their team’s work efforts. Spending time explaining the customer, their needs, and the role the teams’ efforts will play in meeting those needs. Setting a tone of not just delivery, but customer satisfaction and problem solutions.

In the first question above, there was talk about connecting the Roadmap to the Backlog. What was missing in that question was the:

The vision of the Product Owner
Teams Mission
Customer personas – so that the team can ENVISION the customer’s challenges and needs
Permission to experiment and learn about how best to solve these needs
Intangibles, perhaps things that weren’t even asked for, that would delight the customer

It’s helping the team to understand these aspects and then to deliver “towards them” that I think can be truly motivational and inspirational.

Question: Where is management support for product owner role & backing their decisions?

Answer: In addition to coaching and budgeting for professional development and skill-building activities management should:

Provide feedback on product backlog content, priorities, and dates with a clear purpose
Support acceptance decisions the Product Owner makes during each sprint
Management will route all work for teams through the product owner to support a single voice for work priorities
Manage consistent and qualified staffing for teams from sprint to sprint with minimal changes throughout a release
Key Stakeholders will provide clear direction on prioritizing to achieve corporate strategy and product management objectives shown in product roadmaps
Development Executives will support the Product Owner in helping Key Stakeholders to understand and accept the necessity for making tradeoff decisions on dates and/or feature content consistent with actual team capacity

Question: What defines success for a product owner?

Answer: Two critical criteria for success in the Product Owner role are, Profitable products and satisfied customers. Other criteria include Strength of Product Backlog, Constant delivery of Value, Attaining of Release Goals, and Understanding of Product Vision by team members along with defining a successful Product Roadmap.

Product releases deliver great value as perceived by customers and stakeholders
Balances feature delivery with sustainable software development
Stakeholders and team members understand the rationale for prioritization and forecasting is visible and transparent
There are no surprises on progress, feature content, dates, or priority changes made along the way
Scrum Team members feel meaningful accomplishment from delivering “winning” features
Continuously learning and improving the use of agile principles and practices
Deliver a product that is aligned with the roadmap

Question: What is the definition of Release Product Owner versus Feature Product Owner?

Answer: When a Scrum Product Team includes more than 2 Scrum Teams we have found that it’s more than one Product Owner can handle. In this case, we suggest adding a Release Product Owner as a Product Owner Team lead. The Product Owner team covers all the responsibilities and activities of a Product Owner divided into Release Product Owner and team Product Owner roles.

Release Product Owner leads the Product Owner team and is first and foremost responsible that the Product Owner team presents a Single Voice

A clear statement of vision, direction, release purpose and goals
Managing overall Product Backlog and publishing the Product Backlog
Show alignment w/ product roadmap
Getting stakeholder buy-in on Product Backlog
Prioritization of Product Backlog
Prepare appropriate Product Backlog to drive release planning
Ongoing release plan forecasting
Deployment & release readiness checklist
Market launch split out to PM

Team Product Owner (or just Product Owner) is a member of the Scrum Team responsible for working with the team from sprint to sprint and grooming the breakdown of Features into sprint sized User Stories so that they are prepared for Sprint Planning

Prioritize user stories to drive Sprint Planning
Acceptance criteria of stories in the sprint
Day to day available to the team for conversations about stories in the sprint
Accepting stories in the sprint

Question: What features should be removed from the product? How do you know they should be removed? How can you tell that you can’t remove a feature?

Answer: Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, is essential. It is important to NOT build things that are not needed, but it’s also important to remove features that have a negative ROI. Understanding what features are really needed, and how slim we can make them, is a critical skill for increasing product agility. However, understanding what features need to be removed is also a critical skill for product agility.

Question: How non-functional requirements can be dealt with within the product backlog?

Answer: Non-functional requirements play an important role in the overall product development and delivery. These are the requirements without which the functional part cannot be termed as complete. Let’s first understand what a non-functional requirement is, “Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) define system attributes such as security, reliability, performance, maintainability, scalability, and usability. They serve as constraints or restrictions on the design of the system across the different backlogs.” – Scaledagile. There are different ways of handlings such requirements, like:

Create user stories in the backlog – The non-functional requirements can be similar to the “constraints” we put on the system. It can be written in the same format as the usual user story.
Inclusion in DoD – The team can add these requirements as part of their definition of Done. If it is one of the parameters in the definition, it will make sure the NFR doesn’t get missed out and the team can keep track of it along with the original story.
Acceptance Criteria – Non-functional requirements may also be articulated as part of Acceptance criteria which are circumstances that a product must fulfill to be accepted by a user, customer or other stakeholders.

Question: What is the relationship between vision and product roadmap?

Answer: Vision is a sort of goal you see for your organization and for the product. You do not own the vision, but you should have a clear sense of what it is as you help carry it out. Thus, there are three elements that constitute a vision on a broader level, the purpose, the picture, and the values. For any product, it’s really important to understand why we are building it, and what purpose will it serve to the customer or the client.

Next comes the picture where we see how the end result should look like and lastly what value will it deliver. The vision statement can be just a few lines and it is not going to be very elaborative or prescriptive.

To achieve this vision, a roadmap is created, it is a powerful means to define how a product is likely to grow, align the stakeholders, and procure a budget for developing the product and it is also a visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of the product offering over time. It outlines goals, milestones, and deliverables for a product in development.

e.g. Let’s say a Space travel company has a vision that “affordable and repeatable space travel”. The product strategy is to build vehicles capable of going to space multiple times, along with the supporting infrastructure to make that possible. The product roadmap is (for each spaceship) the high-level steps required to build a spaceship that meets the requirements of the product strategy, which in turn is fulfilling the company vision.

Product Owner Interview Questions and Answers – Part II: Click Here

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