TL;DR Connecting the dots between the business and developers
When creating a website or an app,A Product Owner, or PO, is someone who helps a development team (a team of mostly programmers) with orchestrating the planning around all the development work. Next to that, they speak with everyone to make sure everyone is aligned.
To create a feature on a website (e.g. adding a 'favorite' feature), a lot of people need to do something. So who does what, and when? "What do we need?" The Product Owner will speak with many people in the business to make sure that we know exactly what we're developing, why and when. The Product Owner also makes sure we don't miss anything (Legal, PR, compliance, security, etc), and that we're all informed and aligned
First, after gathering the requirements from the stakeholders, the Product Owner writes technical documents (Jira tickets) and speaks with the developers about the feasibility and the estimation of the work. Could we build this? Should we maybe split this work into 4 parts?
Before the developers start working on the code, a lot of people are working in the background to prepare. Preparing can be: creating designs, creating analytics, checking with legal, checking with other moving pieces within the business etc. Once the preparation has reached an acceptable level (but not 100% yet), the developers can start coding the first pieces, while the others keep prepping the later parts.
The process to support this cycle is called Scrum, and is created to make sure that developers don't lose time when coding while waiting for designs, decisions from legal, etc. For more information, you can watch a Youtube video about Scrum here
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