A Product Owner is not a project manager. And definitely not a note-taker.
In any serious product team, the Product Owner (PO) is the strategic middle ground between business and development. Their job isn’t to please everyone - it’s to make the right calls. They own the what and the why of the product, translating messy input from users, stakeholders, and leadership into clear priorities and decisions.
The PO is the voice of the problem, not the boss of the dev team.
Too many teams treat the Product Owner like a glorified JIRA machine. That’s a waste of everyone’s time. A real PO protects the product from chaos. They understand the market, the customer, the business model, and the technical constraints - and make sure what gets built actually moves the needle.
Good POs don’t just groom backlogs - they groom understanding.
They ask sharp questions. They cut features. They clarify intent. They create structure from ambiguity. If the dev team is constantly confused, it’s rarely an engineering issue - it’s a Product Ownership issue. A strong PO makes everyone faster by reducing guessing and surfacing trade-offs early.
The best Product Owners operate like systems designers.
They don’t just prioritize - they see how each decision affects the entire product ecosystem. They manage expectations up, down, and across. And most importantly, they take responsibility for outcomes, not just outputs. That’s what separates a backlog babysitter from a true owner.
