business analyst vs product owner
Highlights
https://www.reddit.com/r/agile/comments/cidigy/can_someone_explain_the_difference_between_a/
in my company a business analyst is doing the work between the basic requirements and the development. so he defines the processes, the errors, how and what info should be taken from external apis etc.
As others said, BA can be many things. PO is one specific thing. It’s hard to answer without knowing what type of BA you are.
The primary differences I would expect are the PO’s control over sprint goals, official position as liaison to the business, and that the PO is definitely a leadership role for a team, where a BA is often a supporting function that gathers requirements.
An owners job is to make decisions and be responsible for them. An analysts job is to take the data and come to conclusions for the owner to use. This is very dependant on the individual company as titles often don’t mean anything. Often a manager will have a list of titles and have to choose, rather than create one that actually conveyed the job role.
- Business Analysts on non scrum teams have typically been responsible for producing a Business Requirements Document (BRD), and at times they even get involved in both the change management process during a project, and the early design stages where their BRD typically gets translated into a tech specs document.
- Business Analysts on non scrum teams sometimes conduct focus groups and other methods to extract business requirements.
While a traditional business analyst role is much more about analytics of the business domain, understanding the processes, writing documentation and requirements, a product owner is more about taking ownership of the product, being directly involved in the team that delivers the product and being a proponent of agile.
