YDS: Does a Product Owner Need Technical Skills?

Today's question is from a viewer who wants to know if a Product Owner needs technical skills to be successful. Todd and Ryan discuss the pros and cons of a technical Product Owner and give their guidance on when these skills can be helpful?

What do you think? Does a PO need technical skills? Let us know in the comments! Want to learn more about Scrum?

Buy Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems -

Join Ryan and Todd in a Professional Scrum Master course:

And make sure you subscribe to the channel!

DISCLAIMER: Links included in this description might be affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide, I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge for you! Thank you for supporting the channel so we can continue to provide you with free content each week!

FTC DISCLAIMER: This video is not sponsored by anyone.

Sharing Scrum knowledge to help you grow as a Scrum Practitioner and to solve complex problems.

#scrum #agile #professional scrum

[KentPaul]

The top con to a product owner being technical is rushing to solutions design where it’s the job of the dev team to decide the how. Writing stories only on why and how is slightly difficult 😊

[rajadas]

Great topic. And my take is, based on context the answer will vary. Say, the team is core platform team (hope u know what I mean) who supports in the organization in building, maintaining, optimizing common components. Having a PO who can speak in that team’s language is really desirable. On other hand, if the team is functional team having a PO who has better grip on customer need, stakeholders management is always great. Someone said, a great PO has engineer’s mind, customer’s heart and diplomat’s mouth.

[dcn]

perhaps a "technical awareness" is more desirable than being full on dev skilled up

[DanieleMazzoni]

Seems really apt since I signed today exactly as a technical Scrum Master...
Must be destiny.

[BernieWonka]

I believe that the answer to that question is "no". The PO does not need technical skills (related to how the solutions will be built). If the PO has technical skills, and he/she believes the developers are not implementing the best practices/technologies, he might ask for a new cell that better suits his/hers expectations, but, if we consider (as we always should) the value of "Respect", he can not even suggest a different technical approach for building the solution. No matter what background or knowledge the PO or the SM have, they shouldn't cross their roles' boundaries.

[forcemark]

Excellent point about platform teams.

Zombie Scrum Survival Guide. This is the way.

[Monroecheeseman]

Thinking about Product Owners, how about talking about status reports in Agile/Scrum? Have you guys touched on that topic? Status reports are such an integral part of the Project Management role, what happens to them as we start using agile practices?

[MrCire]

Technical skills? not needed as I understand that term. I would suggest subject matter expertise of the product being developed would be necessary.

[inframatic]

In my 10 years of software development, 9/10 times the non-techie PO was useless or lacking compared to the techie PO, unable to break down problems into tasks well because they lack the tech knowledge to go deeper, unable to understand talks of tech solutions and which way the team should drive development, unable to connect github to their task management tool to automate task creation. The PO’s main job is to bring value to the development process and if it is a tech project, that value is related to tech. POing without the tech aspect is just the easy way into POing and unfortunately it will sacrifice some respect from those who do know the tech on the Scrum Team who can see in meetings that this PO just can’t contribute as much to the project