Despite the fact that business analysis provides HUGE benefits to agile teams, it’s still rare to find teams that know how to maximize the agile BA role.
The most successful teams create strong partnerships between business analysts and product owners. When great BAs become BFFs with great POs, the right stuff gets built and end users enjoy high value products!
So, how can business analysts buddy-up to product owners? Product owners appreciate BAs who:
- Understand the product owner role. Great BAs understand the mission, goals and priorities of the product owner/product owner team. They participate in the creation of the product vision, product road map and personas so they have a shared understanding of value drivers. They integrate this understanding into all of their project work.
- Fill in the details. If the product owner focuses on high level scope and requirements, BAs can fill in details like exceptions, business rules, data definitions, etc.
- Create and share models. BAs can use typical analysis models (process flows, matrices, story mapping, etc.) to help the product owner facilitate decisions. BA models help the product owner and the stakeholders make connections! If the team sees connections between parts of the product, user experience, and data, then end users will get a better, more valuable product.
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