How to write the right product owner job description? Does your company need to make the job description for this role? This article will help you to describe a product owner job description.
Define the product owner job description
Defining the product owner job description is not always easy. If you describe it incorrectly, this will have significant consequences:
- attract bad profiles
- risk to have someone just want to control development team
Before defining this product owner job description, don’t forget that people will check different criteria before to contact you.
Thus the candidates will look for these criteria:
- Profile title
- job description
- salary / ADR
- the company and its reputation for agility
- location
Certain criteria will be linked to your context and cannot be modified.
Non-modifiable criteria
The location of the mission may be eliminatory
If you have a business in a big city like Chicago, you are much more likely to attract the profiles than in the suburbs.
Some companies have difficulty filling their workforce despite higher salary/ADR cause of location.
Agile reputation of the company
In the world of agility, the agile reputation of the company is also a real selection criterion. Some companies are automatically excluded from a number of agilists; however, it’s less important for product owner if you compare with scrum master.
Workable criteria
Certain criteria that can make the difference will be in your hands. It is therefore strongly advised to work well on these criteria on which the company can make the difference especially when the company have a bad location and/or a bad agile reputation.
Profile title
For the title, you can use these two titles
- product owner
- product owner / product manager
Some profiles will be very motivated by the term “product manager”; However you have to really purpose some task of a product manager in the job. You can check on this article to be sure: Product Manager vs Product Owner
But don’t use theses very bad words because they give an old image of your company:
- project owner support
- assistant to the contracting authority
- project sponsor support
- project owner
- contracting authority
- project contractor
If the role is particular, it’s better to be clear with you title. For example:
If you hire someone for theses roles but you have written “product owner”, you have a risk that this person will be very unhappy.
Good description of the missions of the product owner job description
Surprisingly, the written missions about product owner that I see now on the professional social networks are better; there are probably the excellent agile coaches (or even experienced product owners) who help to write them.
Between two job ads, the experienced product owner will favor the one that is fairer, although this will not be the only criterion.
And you have a great article that gives you everything to write an excellent description of the product owner job description: Product Owner Responsibilities. Take it like reference! It will give you more chance to have experienced profiles.
Indeed it’s better to avoid some expressions that are still too present and that go against the role of product owner:
- will test the work of the development team
- will give the work to them
It will be essential that the description really reflects the role that the future product owner will have upon his arrival. A product owner who discovers a reality very different from the promises of the description sheet will be very quickly demotivated … Indeed a demotivated product owner will destabilize the whole team.
My last advice: write the good salary!,Now, it’s just a dream to think you will have a cheap good product owner.
Conclusion the product owner job description
I hope this article on the product owner job description will allow you to attract the profiles that really meet your expectations. By following all of the tips in this article, you will be more confortable to attract the product owner profile you expect.
If you have any additional questions about the product owner job description, don’t hesitate to ask me in the comments. If you have other tips for attracting a product owner job description, please also share them in the comments.
Useful link: product owner (in french)
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