This article is based on the output from a session by Pete Thompson and Victoria Banner at the June 2022 BA Manager Forum, the 2017 paper ‘The BA and the Product Owner Role’ by David Beckham, Karen Lees and Debbie Paul, and the BA Brew podcast of the same title.

The Product Owner role is defined as: “accountable for maximising the value of a product, primarily by incrementally managing and expressing business and functional expectations for a product to the Development Team (s)”

In the 2017 BAMF workshop, the question was posed: “Should the role of Product Owner be part of the role of Business Analyst?”

Categorising skills

Delegates at the workshop grouped, after much discussion, the following skills required for the Product Owner role into three categories – Personal, Analytical and Business:

An examination of BA and PO roles at Aviva showed that the PO role required more business and personal skills and fewer analytical skills while the BA role required equal amounts of analytical and personal skills and fewer business skills. However, where BAs were recruited internally at Aviva, they tended to have more business skills.

Comparing the BA and PO roles

At the June 2022 BAMF forum, delegates compared the BA and PO roles.

The BA role was seen as an agent of change; an independent internal consultant working across the organisation as an adviser, identifying and defining problems, defining requirements and maximising the value offered to stakeholders. The PO role was seen as being focused on maximising the value offered by the product and the investment, being responsible and accountable, leading within the product domain, negotiating, defining and owning PBIs (Product Backlog Items) and maximising the value the product offered to the customer.

Shared areas of responsibility

Victoria Banner created this visual showing the typical scope of the respective roles, with the shared areas of responsibility highlighted:

Skills: exclusive vs. shared

Delegates at the June 2022 BAMF looked at Personal Skills, Business Skills and Professional Skills – debating in groups which skills are exclusive to each role and which are shared. This is a summary of their output.

In conclusion

At the 2017 BAMF workshop it was agreed that the BA profession can struggle to define role boundaries in the Agile world, sometimes being asked to be proxy POs or becoming POs simply because of a large amount of exposure to a single project. It seemed that while BAs could do the job it was unclear whether they should, and that might depend on organisational context.

The 2017 paper concluded: “In a small, multi-skilled enterprise or company with a limited product range it could be successful to blend the role, however for large globally-distributed, multi-market and heavily legislated organisations it remains a questionable ambition.”

In the BA Brew discussion, it was agreed that in the short-term BAs and POs need to discuss and collaborate, and to agree their responsibilities. In the longer term, it would be beneficial to develop more clarity about the BA and PO roles.