Are you an aspirant wondering how to prepare for product Owner interviews? Don't worry! We provide the frequently-asked Product Owner interview questions and answers in this blog. You may be fresher or more experienced – it doesn't matter, this blog post will help you to polish your knowledge of Product Owner roles and responsibilities. Yes! This blog post comes with all the key Product Owner interview questions with neat and concise answers.
Gone are the days when software product development is done using traditional approaches such as the waterfall, V-model, spiral model, etc. They have their own drawbacks, such as resistance to adaptation to changes, long duration, etc. Today, client requirements change over time based on market scenarios, customer expectations, etc. So, software product development must be dynamic and adjust to the changing demands. That's why agile product development has become the buzzword in the software development industry in recent years.
This way, the Scrum framework is one of the robust Agile methodologies with which you can accelerate product development and deliver expected products. You can monitor the progress of the product development during the development process itself. It means you can verify the functionalities of the product features before the final product release. On top of all, you can adjust product goals and roadmap with an agile approach if they will bring out the expected results.
Every scrum team has three vital roles: Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Developers. Of the three roles, product owners play a crucial role in product design, development, and release. That’s why there is much demand for product owners in the job market.
This blog provides the key Product Owner interview questions with answers. Read them from top to bottom to crack your interview confidently. We have categorized the questions and answers into three sections:
It is an iterative method of software product development. Every iteration is a short period that will last for approximately 2 to 4 weeks. This method divides the project into multiple modules with specific goals and limited time frames. This means every product development iteration will deliver a particular product functionality. Finally, all the functionalities are combined together to release a final product.
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The Scrum framework is a project management tool that encourages teamwork and incremental progress. This tool simplifies product development by enabling teams to work together. Not only that, this tool supports the development team to move towards the goal rapidly. When teams work with the scrum framework, they are clearly informed of the product goals, product backlog items, sprint plans, sprint backlog items, and mainly the development progress. In short, the Scrum framework provides transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
Every scrum team has three key roles: Product Owners, developer team, and Scrum Masters.
Sprint is the core of every agile development. Essentially, a sprint represents a time frame. Development teams need to complete spring backlogs within a sprint. A typical sprint lasts for over 30 days. The Teams can start a new sprint only when the previous sprint is over.
A sprint goal is nothing but a specific functionality of a product that should be released at the end of a sprint. The product owner and the development team decide on the Sprint goal
The product backlog has the list of works to be completed that are required to make a final product.
The product owner is responsible for delivering products to customers' satisfaction. To achieve this, the product owner acts as the bridge between customers and the development team. Product owners understand customers' expectations and accurately communicate them to the development team.
Moreover, the Product owner is the one who sees the vision of a product for the very first time. The main thing is that product owners must prioritize backlog items technically. By doing so, product owners drive the development team to complete the product development, meeting customers' expectations on time.
Essentially, the burndown chart provides a graphical representation of the completed product backlogs and pending backlogs of a sprint. You can quickly study the sprint's progress through this chart in a single view. For example, the sprint is progressing well if you find more completed backlogs and only a few pending backlogs in a burndown chart.
Know that the Y-axis of every burndown chart shows the sprint product backlog items, and the X-axis shows the respective timelines. As the backlogs get completed, the graph moves downwards. The moment all backlogs are done, the graph will hit the X-axis.
A product owner can instantly pass the relevant feedback to the development team based on the insights he/she observed from the burndown chart. Also, they can decide when to release an increment or product.
DoD, or Definition of Done, specifies the quality requirements for an increment. An increment is nothing but a release of a sprint. It can only be finalized as the 'Done' task when an increment meets customers' specified quality expectations. Note that DoD can differ for every organization and team. Everyone in the team works together to meet the well-defined requirements of a product. As a whole, DoD encourages transparency and shared responsibility among scrum team members.
Product Owner | Product Manager |
They mainly focus on product goals. A product owner acts as the voice of customers, indeed. | They focus on the entire product development process |
They work closely with developers, stakeholders, and customers to imbibe the expectations of the product in-depth. So, they precisely direct development teams on what to do next and how. | They work closely with the development team to ensure work progress meets customer expectations. Simply put, they provide that the development process is moving in the right direction. |
A product owner must:
Product Owner | Scrum Master |
They focus on product development based on the product backlog items. | They focus on product development based on the sprint backlogs |
Monitor the work progress at every stage of the product development | Update the development team about work progress respective to sprint planning |
Involve and remove impediments in the progress of product development. | Motivates development teams to be in line with sprint backlogs |
Encourages analytical thinking, problem solving, etc., to development teams. | Encourages planning, self-organization, and implement agile methodologies. |
Acceptance criteria are a set of conditions a software must meet to satisfy customer expectations. Every user story in a software product backlog will have its acceptance criteria. It means acceptance criteria will vary for every user story. Mainly, acceptance criteria are designed from the customer’s viewpoint.
The significant thing about acceptance criteria is that the development team must be well-informed about the acceptance criteria for a user story before they start working on it. This method completely avoids producing undesired results at the end of product development.
The product owner is the one who crafts the acceptance criteria in line with the user's expectations
A competent product owner should have the following qualities.
A product owner must employ the following roles to make cross-functional product development.
Agile | Scrum |
Essentially, agile is a philosophy | Scrum is one of the agile methodologies |
Agile focuses only on goals | Scrum focuses on processes and divides the product goal into sprints. |
The agile team consists of members from various teams | Scrum has specific roles such as product owner, scrum master, and developer team. |
In its basic form, a Product roadmap is an action plan that includes all the stages of product development along with their respective timelines. In other words, it has all the product features, the plans and strategies to develop the product, and the timelines to release the features. You can break a product roadmap down to the development team’s day-to-day activities.
Generally, a product owner creates the roadmap. While building a roadmap, the product owner deeply analyses various crucial external factors such as market conditions, value propositions, and other associated constraints and designs the roadmap accordingly.
A product owner can use four techniques to manage backlog prioritization. They are given as follows:
The product discovery process involves understanding and developing a product as customers expect. This process has two essential stages such as exploration as well as validation. A product owner plays a pivotal role in the product discovery process.
In the exploration stage, a product owner collaborates with stakeholders to understand the product expectations and identify potential issues in product development. Not only that, the product owner evaluates the existing products thoroughly to get more understanding.
In the validation stage, the information gathered in the exploration stage is validated with data and customer feedback.
User story mapping is a method product owners can use to convert the product vision into a perfect product roadmap. Using the user story mapping technique, a product owner understands customers' journeys when using a product. As a result, they prioritize backlog items, identify the risks, and identify solutions effectively. Also, they can break the product design into epics and user stories more precisely. So, teams can view the clear picture of the product and be clear with what product they will build.
Following are the mistakes a product owner can make in the product backlog refinement process.
A product owner must attend daily scrums, sprint reviews, sprint planning, and sprint retrospectives. This is because the product owner can ensure whether the development process is in line with the expectations, identify obstacles to the progress, etc. Knowing everything happening in product development, the product owner can quickly solve problems and speed up the entire process.
Definition of Ready (DoR) | Definition of Done (DoD) |
It deals with the product requirements at the initial stages of product development. | It deals with product releases in the form of increments. |
It includes user stories. All Team members are aware of epics as well as user stories in-depth. | It includes a working product. All team members how an increment works and about its quality. |
It is designed based on performance criteria. | It is designed based on the acceptance criteria. |
Yes. A product owner cancels a sprint. They cancel a sprint when a sprint goal is not aligned with the product goal.
Velocity represents the volume of work a scrum team can manage in a sprint. In other words, Velocity represents the number of product backlogs completed to release an increment. Considering the Velocity of sprints, a product owner decides whether to change the release timelines. Besides, product owners can effectively plan the next sprint with the help of velocity figures.
A product owner should be open to communicating with clients throughout the product lifecycle. It will help product owners understand clients' needs and develop products that meet entirely clients' requirements. Besides, the product owner must be capable of briefing the technical aspects of products to clients in an understandable manner.
Now, it's time to wrap! We hope this blog helped you to boost your confidence on the subject significantly. Remember, winning a game doesn’t happen with an overnight effort. It demands continuous focus, gapless practice, and unshaken confidence. If you want to crack the product owner interview, you must sharpen your knowledge with good practice to shine better and better. So, you keep reading the product owner's questions and answers repeatedly to become familiar with the subject.
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Madhuri is a Senior Content Creator at MindMajix. She has written about a range of different topics on various technologies, which include, Splunk, Tensorflow, Selenium, and CEH. She spends most of her time researching on technology, and startups. Connect with her via LinkedIn and Twitter .