What is the Role of SAFe Product Owner?

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The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) enables enterprises to scale agility and lean strategies across the organization. A key role within SAFe is the Product Owner, who plays an instrumental role in being the voice of the customer and maximizing the value of the product and that of the Agile Team.

The Responsibilities of a SAFe Product Owner

Unlike Scrum, a SAFe Product Owner supports two teams, at the most, and owns the Team Backlog, as opposed to the Product Backlog in Scrum.

They liaise with the Product Manager, customers, and stakeholders to define visions, align development to business goals, and play a significant role during the Program Increment (PI) Planning.

They are responsible for maintaining and prioritizing the Team Backlog, Iteration Planning and defining stories as per priority, and work closely with the team during the Program Execution to track the flow, maintain priorities and agree if the accepted stories meet the Definition of Done.

A crucial part of their role is to connect with other Product Owners within the Agile Release Train (ART) to check and coordinate dependencies and work across teams during the Inspection and Adaption events to see how best to improve processes and increase team velocity and quality.

Jira Reporting Tools for an Agile Overview

Jira is the most common tool used by Agile Teams, and SAFe Product Owners can get an Agile overview of the entire project by expanding the capabilities of Jira by leveraging a Jira reporting tool and time tracking app, like Report Builder to:

·   Report on key performance metrics,

·   Evaluate progress, and

·   Communicate the progress to the stakeholders

Most SAFe Product Owners face challenges like reporting and visibility. These issues can easily be resolved with no-coding Jira reporting apps that build on top of Jira. 

Report Builder, for example, allows Product Owners to drag every issue and project created in Jira into the app, along with the logged time, to get a complete overview of different projects. 

With this increased visibility, Product Owners can efficiently plan resources, identify roadblocks, resolve them and track SAFe and Agile Project Management metrics to increase Agile team efficiencies in real-time.

SAFe Product Owners can take advantage of the Jira ecosystem of robust time tracking and reporting tools to create Jira custom reports for time logs, team backlogs, burnup and burndown charts, and a lot more to get an agile view of the project and optimize the value during Program Execution and Program Increment Planning.

Increased Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder management is an important responsibility of a SAFe Product Owner. Jira reporting and time-tracking tools permit Product Owners to accurately represent the work of the Agile teams and increase stakeholder engagement. 

Product Owners can easily create visual reports of dependencies and timelines or any custom Jira report without extracting and manipulating data from Jira on excel sheets, saving SAFe Product Owners a lot of time and simplifying SAFe implementation.

Jira custom reporting tools empower Product Owners and help them bridge the gap between Agile teams and stakeholders through increased project visibility and enhanced communication between teams, management, customers, and stakeholders.