Job profile: Product Owner (m/f/d)

The role of product owners can vary between companies and teams. In general, their function is to manage the product backlog efficiently. This can be achieved by participating in the daily Scrum meetings, clearly defining and communicating the product goals and making them transparent to all team members. They should also keep an eye on the user stories and strategically oversee the sprints.

What tasks await you as a product owner?

• Responsibility for maximising the value or benefit of the product being developed
• Determination of the tasks from the product backlog and their management
• Creation of user stories
• Project Management
• Requirements Management
• Presentation of the project progress
• Representing the interests of stakeholders, clients and management
• Interface and communication between end customers and developers - Stakeholder management
• Developing a vision of the end product

What hard skills do you need to work as a product owner?

From our evaluation, experience as a product owner, scrum and user stories are the top 3 skills to pursue this profession.

• Completed studies in the field of computer science or business informatics
• Solid technical knowledge in the areas of applications and processes, UX/UI, programming, networks and cloud computing is an advantage
• Experience in the creation of user stories and management of the product backlog
• Certification for agile project management e.g. Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Master
• Experience with Scrum management tools such as Confluence and Kanban
• Project management
• Product management
• Requirements Management
• Expertise in the product or in the industry

Welches sind die Top 3 Skillcluster mit hoher Nachfrage:

The top 3 skill clusters with high demand are PO, Scrum and DevOps:

Welches sind die Top Skills und wie hoch ist der Stundensatz?

Some skills are currently in high demand on the market, as they are in higher demand than freelancers offering them in this area. If you have these skills as a PO, this has a positive effect on the hourly rate you can charge. The skills with current surplus demand are:

• User Stories
• Business process modelling
• AWS
• Product Backlog

As a junior product owner, you can expect an hourly rate of 75 to 130 EUR. If you have several years of experience as a senior product owner, your hourly rate can be over 150 EUR. Please note that the industry and size of the company have a great influence on the salary possibilities. The hourly rates are average hourly rates and do not take into account price increases due to inflation.

But what exactly are the activities of a product owner?

As a product owner (PO), you work within a Scrum team to complete a project economically and qualitatively well. Within the team, the PO is specifically responsible for maximising the value and quality of the product to be developed. The product backlog, which contains all the requirements for the product to be developed, e.g. software, helps him or her to do this. The PO constantly arranges, prioritises and develops the product backlog in order to achieve the product goals and is responsible for the success of the product. The PO decides which requirements will be implemented in the next sprint run. Before the project can even start, they also have to communicate with the customer to get an idea of the product to be developed, set up a plan for it and keep an eye on the development costs.

An important task of the PO to present the vision of the product is the formulation of the user stories, which represent the goals of a product from the user's point of view. Transparent communication of the product vision and the user stories to the project team is another important task of the PO, so that everyone has the same idea of the goal to be achieved. As Project Lead, the PO is also responsible for regular communication with customers and stakeholders. After each sprint, the PO checks whether the corresponding specifications have been met by the developers, whether the partial product can be accepted and gives feedback.

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