Stakeholder & Developer Communication Powered by Product Owners

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate the challenges and opportunities in the communication between software developers and their stakeholders, as well as the impact that the product owners have on the communication. The research was conducted using a case study approach, and data was mainly collected through observations andinterviews with product owners and software developers at the case company Kry. The findings show that the challenges in communication are the technical language of software developers, difficulty for stakeholders to understand the software development process and difficulty for developers to understand the underlying context of a feature request. The opportunities in their communication are that the developers can better understand the reasons of a request and thus feel more engaged in the product and more satisfied towards the company; Good communication can cut development time and cost. The product owner is shown to be almost irreplaceable due to the large impact that they have. They become translators between the developers and stakeholders, enabling them to communicate better. Furthermore, they are the main point of contact for the stakeholders, thus allowing the developers to focus more on doing development work. However, this might sometimes result in that the developers get involved too late in the process, making changes costly when they discover something faulty. As a conclusion, the communication between stakeholders and developers powered by product owners greatly enhance the possibility to build good, maintainable software and lead to a more sustainable work environment for all involved.