Role of the Business Analyst
Role of a Business Analyst involves the following activities
- Understanding the business needs from various stakeholders
- Eliciting requirements using various techniques
- Documenting the requirements into requirements specifications, user stories, use cases or various formats
- Make sure that the requirements are understood by the development teams
- Test the requirements to make sure that what is defined is what has been produced
Role of a Product Owner
- Product Owner is the decision maker on the Product
- He/She is accountable for the return on investment for the Product
- Naturally, he/she has the budgets with him/her for the product
- Product owner faces the market, the customers, users and he is a Voice of the customer role
- Thus Product Owner is responsible for envisioning, strategizing and taking decisions on how the product needs to progress so that he can generate value for the customer
What more does a PO do as compared to Business Analyst
- As in the above two paragraphs, you can see that Business Analyst is an operational role. The more of the “Doer” role
- Product Owner of course can do all that the Business Analyst does, however, PO role covers a wider spectrum. Product Owner is not just a “Doer”, he/she is a “Decision Maker” for the product
- Product Owner typically hires services of Business Analysts to handle operational or “Doer” responsibilities
- In Scrum, we don’t define a role called Business Analyst. Therefore we can say that “Business Analyst” is a set of responsibilities that Product Owner needs to fulfill – or that is a skill required by the Product Owner. In Scrum, we call the role “Development Team”, which is a set of professionals who have all the skills as a team to make things happen. Business Analysis being one of the skill a Product needs.
What does Business Analyst need to do to become a PO?
The list of responsibilities which a Product Owner needs to do is much wider than a Business Analyst. Business Analyst role is a great start to becoming a Product Owner. However, training needs to start to make sure one graduates from a Business Analyst role to a PO role. Following skills may be required to be built before a Business Analyst can take up a PO role
- Envisioning and Strategizing skills
- Facilitating strategy workshops with stakeholders
- Budgeting and funding
- Coordinating with various stakeholders such as
- Sponsors
- Sales Teams
- End users and end user representatives
- Marketing teams
- Market research teams
- Senior management
- Customer support teams (the ones who face the customers directly – e.g. BPO teams)
- And various other stakeholders who can give feedback about the product
- Knowing Scrum and Incremental/Iterative aspects to make sure continuous delivery of Product is made to seek feedback
Overall, it is important that a Business Analyst starts understanding the PO role and starts building the skills which may not be required as a Business Analyst.