Should a product owner write the product backlog? - Mike Cohn

A product owner is generally either the visionary behind a product or a representative of the users and customers. This means the product owner is perfectly positioned to write the product backlog.

I don’t, however, think a product backlog should be written entirely by the product owner. Others such as team members, users, stakeholders, customers, and so on should be encouraged to contribute their ideas to the product backlog.

The good ideas they contribute will be prioritized highly by the product owner and be developed.

No matter how talented the product owner, it is unreasonable to expect them to think of everything. Developers, users, and others will bring different perspectives that will lead them to think of backlog items beyond what the product owner would have identified.

I think a study cited by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch helps illustrate this. In the study, people associated with a university were asked to brainstorm all the ideas they could for solving the university’s chronic parking problem.

Researchers eliminated “wacky or impractical options.” (For example, I would have suggested hiring aliens to use their UFOs to move cars to off-campus parking locations.)

On average, each study participant identified only 30% of the full set of ideas that were generated. In other words, no one person can be expected to come up with more than about a third of the possible options.

Product owners can probably do better than 30%. They are, after all, usually the experts on their product. But I think this study supports having anyone willing contribute to the product backlog.

That can be as simple as a stakeholder emailing an idea to the product owner. Or it can happen more formally in a story-writing workshop in which stakeholders, users, team members, and the product owner collaborate to generate product backlog items.

In general, the more people who are thinking about a product the better—but the product owner should definitely write some of the product backlog items