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.

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