SAFe® Product Owner v/s Scrum Product Owner

The Product Owner is a key role in agile and will be identified as an emerging job in 2022 by LinkedIn, with a 24 %t annual growth rate in the United States. It can easily be transitioned into individuals working in project management, business analysis, or marketing roles. A product owner is responsible for the development of a product. Their role is to lead the team and guide the product's progress, enabling them to succeed.

In Agile methodology, the product owner plays a vital role in every type of product development. The SAFe® product owner and Scrum product owner sound the same right? Let’s take a look at how they are similar and different.

Who Is The Product Owner In Agile?

An agile product owner is responsible for increasing the product value that an Agile development team builds. Agile product owner communicates with several teams and departments. Product team members, senior management, and product users are part of this group. So, by communicating with different people, he gets feedback, then prioritizes them accordingly for the development teams.

Product owners in agile play a very crucial role not only because they are interacting with everyone to get feedback but also because A product owner may be responsible for the entire backlog of a product. A backlog may be managed for a particular feature of a product in other instances.

What is a SAFe® Product Owner?

The Product Owner is also a team member who communicates with customers by explaining product details and requirements to team members. In SAFe®, due to the large number of products and projects in the program, his role is to work on selected product backlogs, prioritizing them as per urgency. There can be no more than two teams supported by one PO. The SAFe® PO is responsible for maintaining the overall product vision under the supervision of the Product Manager.

What is a Scrum Product Owner?

To maximize the value of the product, the Scrum Product Owner is the sole person responsible. All requirements for the product are listed in the Product Backlog, and this is his/her responsibility to maintain or prioritize. This role is the original owner of the product and is responsible for maximizing its value. The phrase “taking responsibility for the product in its entirety” is key here.

To get a clear understanding of the scrum product owner, let us take an example of “Google docs”. In this application is the product, we only have to write the content, whereas saving the content, correcting grammatical errors, and correcting spelling are done by various other features in the application. So, the product owner should know everything about the product, not only one or two features; he should be accountable for that.

Difference Between SAFe® Product Owner and Scrum Product Owner

When we compare both of them, there is a huge difference between them. They both resemble a product owner, but when the adjective SAFe® and Scrum before the product owner word makes them different.

 

Do You Want To Get Certified As A SAFe® PO Or Scrum PO?

From the above blog, we can see that there are benefits to getting certified as a SAFe® Product Owner or Scrum Product Owner. If you want to get certified in either of these roles, it is important to weigh the pros and cons to see which one is right for you. Both certifications will give you the knowledge and skills you need to be successful in product management, but they each have different emphases. Choose the certification that best aligns with your goals and interests to get the most out of your training.