roles: Product owner

Introduction

As a product owner in a research software project, you are responsible for ensuring that the software being developed delivers value to its intended users and stakeholders. You act as a bridge between principal investigators (project leaders), Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and infrastructure providers on one end, and users, institutional or community stakeholders on the other.

Your role focuses on defining priorities, clarifying requirements and helping shape the long-term direction of the software product. Unlike a project manager, whose focus is primarily on coordinating delivery, timelines and resources, your focus is on maximising the usefulness, usability, sustainability and impact of the software itself.

In research contexts, product owners often operate in complex environments where requirements evolve as scientific understanding develops. This requires balancing research goals, user needs and technical feasibility.

Software development & quality responsibilities, challenges & tasks

Your responsibilities focus on defining, prioritising and guiding the development of high-quality research software, including:

• Understanding user and researcher needs — gathering requirements and ongoing feedback from researchers, domain experts and other stakeholders via focus/user groups and workshops to ensure the software supports real scientific workflows.
• Translating research goals into actionable requirements — working with developers and researchers to convert scientific objectives into implementable software tasks.
• Prioritising software features and improvements — balancing research demands and available resources.
• Promoting software usability and accessibility — ensuring software is documented, understandable, usable and accessible for its intended audience.
• Facilitating communication between technical and non-technical stakeholders — ensuring shared understanding between researchers, developers, users and management. In addition to direct communication, acting as a representative or advocate for user needs in internal/technical meetings.
• Evaluating trade-offs and scope decisions — balancing rapid research outputs with software quality, maintainability and sustainability.
• Managing and refining development backlogs — maintaining prioritised lists of software tasks, issues, feature requests and technical improvements for future releases, together with the project manager.
• Supporting release planning and adoption — coordinating user feedback collection and community engagement.
• Encouraging community contributions and openness — supporting open-source practices, transparent governance and contributor engagements where appropriate.

Software development & quality guidance

• User-centred software design practices — ensuring software development is informed by real user needs and workflows. See for example the ISO 9241-210 Human-centred design principles and the UK Government Service Manual on user-centred design.
• Agile and iterative development practices — supporting continuous improvement and adaptive planning through approaches such as Agile software development and Scrum.
• Software sustainability principles — encouraging maintainable, reusable, and community-supported software. See guidance from the Software Sustainability Institute and the Research Software Alliance (ReSA).
• FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles) — supporting software that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. See the FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS).
• Software quality practices — promoting testing, documentation, version control, code review, issue tracking, and release management. See resources from CodeRefinery, The Turing Way, and the Software Carpentry.
• Research software usability and accessibility guidance — ensuring software is usable by diverse research communities, including consideration of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and inclusive design practices.
• Community governance models for research software — supporting transparent contribution and decision-making processes through practices such as contributor guidelines, codes of conduct, and open governance models. See guidance from The Turing Way and the Open Source Guides.
• Research Software Maturity Models (RSMM) — understanding broader sustainability and quality considerations for research software projects. See the Research Software Maturity Model (RSMM).

AI Disclosure

This work was produced with the assistance of ChatGPT 5.5 Instant, under the strict editorial control and factual verification of the human author.