Over the years i have done several RASCIs for organisations and now i have merged these for fun and extracted what the role of the PO is for my ten last companies i worked for. Perhaps inspiration for someone? My advice for RASCIs is to keep them short as a tool for initial discussions about roles and responsibilities, not only for POs. Over time this RASCI becomes a three bullet list on overall responsibilities just as guidance for new hires. To be comfortable in a role is a core need for a human being but also knowing what expectations it is on me so i can fill potential gaps with training etc. To be comfortable in a role is the sum of your competence, your awareness of your gaps and the plan for eliminating these. And here plays the RASCI a role to create that awareness.
Comfortable in my role = Competence + Gaps + Training
/Ove Holmberg
One thing is common with all companies and it is the idea about that product ownership is a task in a RASCI and not a profession. I have met too many exhausted POs doing the PO thing when doing their ”real work” first. Please stop.
But here the gross list comes for your inspiration…
| Adherence to established processes |
| Adjust project priorities according to evolving business and project conditions. |
| Adjust the scope, priority and timing of deliverables in collaboration with the agile team, product line management and other stakeholders. |
| Assuring that the checklist for checkpoint is used and filed for traceability each time a new MVP is shipped to production |
| Assuring the checkpoint decisions and the content for the check points are fulfilled. |
| Assuring there is a healthy balance between new functionality, maintenance and life cycle. |
| Available to support the Scrum Master and Development Team when clarifications are required or obstacles occur. |
| Collaborate and communicate with stakeholders and users in order to gather input and prioritize the product backlog |
| Collaborate with different development teams and source systems to make data available to our customers in the best way, always using best practices |
| Collect and respond to customer and stakeholder feedback, appropriately adjusting future scope, timing and priority of deliverables. |
| Communicating the product vision and clearly expressing Product Backlog items |
| Coordinate dependencies with other Teams within the value stream |
| Daily decision maker for the squad, empowered to accept/reject deliverables. |
| Decide what to add and remove from the backlog |
| Decide when there is enough value to release to production together with stakeholders |
| Decides when there is enough value to release to production in collaboration with relevant stakeholders and specialists. |
| Dedicated business resource assigned to product squad(s) that evolved from the business sponsor role. |
| Divide the overall project goals into prioritized deliverables for sequential and focused progress. |
| Empowered to make decisions on the firm’s behalf, in collaboration with the product manager. |
| End to end ownership for the entire value chain of a product |
| Ensure IT services are aligned with the IT strategy, Company Target |
| Ensure new code conforms to established coding standards, design specification and performance goals. |
| Ensure problem, incident and crisis management |
| Ensure regulatory compliance, maintenance, life cycle and governance of services/applications. Ensure that the backlog items value is clearly expressed and understood by the team |
| Ensure that agreed investments opportunities/MVPs from the value stream roadmap are delivered |
| Ensure that backlog priority and content is transparent, and understood by the stakeholders |
| Ensure that the product has a long-term viable architecture by actively working with the architectural debt as an integrated part of the product roadmap/backlog |
| Ensures that the Discovery work takes place, refer to chapter 7.1 Discovery |
| Escalate business decisions as required. |
| Escalate unmitigated risks and backlog issues to the Product Manager |
| Expectation management towards stakeholders, this includes to establish, maintaining and communicating forecasts of what can be done at a certain date or when a specific part of the backlog will be done, based on the Team’s velocity. |
| Focus on the business user community and act as a link between IT and business |
| Focus on what to build and to maximizing the value of the investment opportunity and the work of the cross functional team |
| Formulates clear user stories and acceptance criteria. |
| Include technical debt reduction in all priority considerations. |
| Is the customer representative. |
| Lead, inspire and develop a cross-functional team with data engineers to excel in their deliveries |
| Maintain an in-depth understanding of market / industry landscape, emerging technologies in the data & analytics field, and customer needs through gathering & analyzing qualitative and quantitative insights to adjust strategy and priorities dynamically |
| Maintain the integrity and guide the evolution of themes, epics and user stories. |
| Makes sure that the Team is crossfunctional with the neccecary skills |
| Manage prioritization of the backlog (features, technical). |
| Manage product backlog priorities, define MVPs and strategically de-scope to achieve rapid feedback cycles |
| Manage stakeholder expectations on deliveries (when, what backlog items etc.) |
| Manage, develop and groom user stories. |
| Manages stakeholders outside of the Development Team (e.g. customers, steering committees, product owners). |
| Maximizing the value of the investment opportunity and the work of the cross functional team |
| Monitor and manage financial impact of decisions and priorities of the product team |
| Operational risk responsibility |
| Own IT assets assigned to the PO |
| Owns the vision, strategy and roadmap for the product |
| Participates in Program Council (when such exists). |
| Prioritize and manage backlog |
| Prioritize user stories for sequential and focused team progress, clarifying the definition of “done” for each user story. |
| Provide a single voice of business vision for the product. |
| Represent the interests of all relevant stakeholders. |
| Request deliverables from other Team’s by talking to respective POs |
| Request specific competences and resources, not existing in the cross functional teams, when needed |
| Requesting tasks to be added to other teams backlog, and agree on priorities with other team’s PO |
| Resolve ambiguous business priority conflicts. |
| Responsible for bringing a whole product to market. |
| Responsible for checkpoint decisions and the content for the check points are fulfilled |
| Responsible for securing budgets for development, maintenance and operations. |
| Responsible for signing off the acceptance criteria and when a user story is finished. |
| Responsible for the maintenance, refinement and prioritisation of the product backlog. |
| Responsible for, and follow up on, KPIs. |
| Secure delivery of appropriate, secure and reliable IT services throughout the life-cycle in accordance to the internal and external regulations and standards |
| Set ambitious and clear product mission and OKRs and translate these into a prioritized roadmap and team backlog that drive agreed KPIs |
| Sets a vision of the product we wish to build and conveys that vision to the scrum team. |
| Solely responsible for managing the product backlog for the agile team. |
| Summarize the customer needs and goals in clear and concise themes, epics and user stories. |
| Take end-to-end ownership of the product (full lifecycle from ideation to optimization) with ultimate accountability for business and customer value delivered |
| Validate that working software is done according to the adopted definition of “done.” |