Best Resources for Product Owners
Whether you’re looking to deepen your expertise, stay updated with industry trends, or find practical tools to enhance your workflow, the right resources are essential for continuous growth and success.
This guide will introduce you to the best resources available for product owners, providing you with a curated selection of valuable materials to enhance your skills and knowledge.
Let’s get started!
TL;DR
- In SaaS companies, a product owner is responsible for developing the product’s vision and navigating the product roadmap to maximize value. This means defining goals to be achieved so that everyone, from the development team to the customers, is on the same page about the product’s future. The product owner is also often referred to as the voice of the customer (VOC) on the Scrum team.
- Becoming a product owner means exploring several diverse fields, from leadership and teamwork to the technical side of things, like Agile and Scrum projects. Here are some resources to help you along in your journey.
- Books: Gain foundational knowledge with “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” and “Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love” to learn from Agile and big tech product design strategies.
- Webinars: Enhance your skills with Userpilot’s user experience, adoption, and engagement optimization webinars. Explore broader product management topics like strategy, user research, and roadmaps with Product School, Mind the Product, and Brighttalk.
- Blogs & Podcasts: Stay updated with industry insights from Product Coalition, The Scrum.org Blog, “Agile for Humans,” and “The Product Podcast.” Learn from the best product leaders and build a thriving product!
- If you’re seriously considering growing in your product owner career, there are certain tools that you definitely need to know of. These tools don’t just relate to product management but instead cover a wide variety of skills, from task collaboration to making data analysis easier. Here are the top picks for you:
- The best tool for product management – Confluence: Makes knowledge management easier by providing a single source of truth for all product-related documentation, such as product specifications, meeting notes, and approval guidelines.
- Project management made easy with Jira: A popular bug and issue-tracking tool to help you manage and prioritize product backlogs and plan sprints.
- The answer to all progress tracking problems – Trello: Great for task organization, Trello enables you to assign tasks, track team progress, and easily collaborate with all team members.
- Perfect product design effortlessly with InVision Studio: Easily collaborate with the design team for upcoming product updates or releases, view prototypes, and test out design updates.
- The best tool for product and user experience insights – Userpilot: An all-in-one product platform that comes with both engagement and analytics features that can empower product teams to create engaging, user-centric experiences while leveraging data-driven insights to continually refine and enhance their products.
- The most popular tool for data analysis – Tableau: Product owners need to extract and visualize actionable insights from the customer feedback and usage tracking data they gather, which becomes easier with Tableau.
- Looking into tools for product owners? Userpilot is an all-in-one product platform with engagement features and powerful analytics capabilities. Book a demo to see it in action!
What is a product owner?
In SaaS companies, a product owner is responsible for developing the product’s vision and navigating the product roadmap to maximize value. This means defining goals to be achieved so that everyone, from the development team to the customers, is on the same page about the product’s future. The product owner is also often referred to as the voice of the customer (VOC) on the Scrum team.
The role also calls for tactical expertise. The product owner not only has to communicate the tasks to be done but also organize sprints and coordinate teamwork until the final product is delivered.
What does a product owner do?
To stay on top of their key role of developing and managing the product, a product owner has to juggle several responsibilities constantly.
The role involves gaining a deeper understanding of the customer and their issues, either through direct communication or by analyzing feedback and tracking user journeys. All this helps identify pain points to help better guide product development.
Drawing from all these insights, the next critical responsibility is to create user stories, and then prioritize which ones to focus on when organizing sprints. The job doesn’t end with sprints though. Product owners need to oversee release management and quality assurance, all the while monitoring important metrics to gauge product performance.
Product owner’s main responsibilities
There are multiple facets of product development that the product owner needs to constantly keep an eye on. These vary from customer understanding to release management to tracking product performance, all the while collaborating across teams as well.
Here are all the main responsibilities that every product owner has to fulfill:
- Define a clear product vision and strategy, aligned with the overall goals of the organization.
- Maintain the product backlog so it is up-to-date and contains detailed user stories and well-documented acceptance criteria.
- Regularly plan and coordinate sprints, closely collaborating with customers and the development team to prioritize requirements based on customer needs and resources utilized.
- Work with cross-functional teams, including customer support, design, and marketing, to ensure everyone is on the same page for a smooth release.
- Gather and analyze customer feedback, track product usage, and perform relevant analysis, like funnel or path analysis, for examining problem areas to inform product decisions.
- Oversee the release process to ensure quality guidelines are met and to optimally schedule new features or updates.
- Monitor product performance by regularly tracking metrics such as user engagement, retention and conversion rates, and customer satisfaction to measure product success.
Best resources for product owners
Becoming a product owner means exploring several diverse fields, from leadership and teamwork to the technical side of things, like Agile and Scrum projects. Here are some resources to help you along in your journey.
Best books for product owners
- “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” by Jeff Sutherland: From the co-creator of Scrum, uncover insights into the approach that changed how software companies work in Agile environments.
- “Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love” by Marty Cagan: Discover tips on how big tech giants like Google and Amazon design their products to continuously deliver great value.
You can find both these books on Amazon, along with their audiobooks as well.
Best webinars for product owners
Here’s a comprehensive list of top webinar sources for product owners, encompassing various needs and focusing on both general product management and software-specific topics:
- Userpilot Events focuses on product growth and user onboarding, key areas for product success. Their webinars can provide valuable insights into optimizing user experience, feature adoption, and engagement strategies.
- Product School offers a mix of free and paid webinars on a wide range of product management topics like product strategy, user research, user story creation, and prioritization.
- Mind the Product frequently hosts webinars on product management best practices, including backlog management, building a product roadmap, and fostering collaboration with development teams.
- Brighttalk offers webinars on various topics, including product management. You can find upcoming webinars on product management by searching for the topic on their website.
Best blogs for product owners
- Product Coalition: The largest community of product management resources, this blog provides everything product-related you can imagine, from building roadmaps and user stories to iterative product improvements and stakeholder management.
- The Scrum.org blog: Find guides about various Scrum roles and how to grow in them, including product owner roles as well.
Best podcasts for product owners
- “Agile for Humans” podcast by Ryan Ripley: Available on Audible and Apple podcasts, this discusses Agile and Scrum practices and different roles necessary to build a successful product.
- “The Product Podcast” by The Product School: Available on Apple podcasts and The Product School site, this features expert interviews with product leaders and experts from Google and Facebook.
Best tools for product owners
If you’re seriously considering growing in your product owner career, there are certain tools that you definitely need to know of. These tools don’t just relate to product management but instead cover a wide variety of skills, from task collaboration to making data analysis easier. Here are the top picks for you:
- The best tool for product management – Confluence: Makes knowledge management easier by providing a single source of truth for all product-related documentation, such as product specifications, meeting notes, and approval guidelines.
- Project management made easy with Jira: A popular bug and issue-tracking tool to help you manage and prioritize product backlogs and plan sprints.
- The answer to all progress tracking problems – Trello: Great for task organization, Trello enables you to assign tasks, track team progress, and easily collaborate with all team members.
- Perfect product design effortlessly with InVision Studio: Easily collaborate with the design team for upcoming product updates or releases, view prototypes, and test out design updates.
- The best tool for product and user experience insights – Userpilot: An all-in-one product platform that comes with both engagement and analytics features that can empower product teams to create engaging, user-centric experiences while leveraging data-driven insights to continually refine and enhance their products.
- The most popular tool for data analysis – Tableau: Product owners need to extract and visualize actionable insights from the customer feedback and usage tracking data they gather, which becomes easier with Tableau.
Conclusion
Professional growth is a continuous journey, and investing in your development is key to staying competitive in the field.
We hope this guide has equipped you with the tools and knowledge needed to excel in your role.
Looking into tools for product owners? Userpilot is an all-in-one product platform with engagement features and powerful analytics capabilities. Book a demo to see it in action!
