Systems Engineers – Value Added Product Owners

Abstract

Agile Methodology requires specialized roles like Product Owners to act as the bridge between the business and the product delivery teams. This calls for specific skills such as a customer-centric, design-thinking mindset and a good vision of the overall system, its capabilities, and the ability to provide the right information at the right time.

The primary duty of a product owner is to maintain a well-refined, prioritized backlog of work items. Systems Engineers are enabled with the right methods and tools to perform solution architecture, design synthesis, system verification, and validation. Systems Engineers have visibility into the overall system, interfaces between sub-systems, and external interface requirements. Enabled with the knowledge of Technical Processes, Systems Engineers are able to describe System Elements, their behavior, and interactions in the best possible detail. This allows them to ensure that functional and non-functional backlog items are defined in unambiguous adequate detail.

By applying their knowledge and expertise as mentioned above, Systems Engineers can effectively perform Product Owner duties and enables Agile teams to work efficiently to deliver the correct system increment at the end of each pre-defined time box.