Roles and teams
Product owner (PO)
Also calledPO
The person who owns one squad's backlog: they turn the roadmap into user stories and acceptance criteria and decide what goes into each sprint.
Product owner is one of the three accountabilities defined in Scrum, alongside the Scrum Master and the developers. The product owner is responsible for ordering the backlog so the team always works on the most valuable item next.
Outside Scrum the line between product owner and product manager is drawn differently by every company. A useful split: the product manager decides which problems matter, and the product owner makes sure the squad builds the chosen solution well.
Common mistake
A product owner who never sees customers or outcome data. Without them, the squad is optimised for throughput rather than for results.