It seems now as if the role of Product Owner has always been with us. We constantly hear:

"Let's run that by the Product Owner."

"The Product Owner will need to decide that."

"Let me introduce you to our Product Owner."

Despite the current ubiquity of the role, as far as team roles are concerned, the Product Owner is a relatively recent addition.

The role of Product Owner was established as part of the Scrum framework in the early 1990s. The Scrum framework came about as an approach to find adaptive solutions to complex problems through experimentation and intense collaboration. Like all Agile frameworks, the primary goal of Scrum is to maximize customer value creation, or in the words of the Agile Manifesto, "satisfy the customer".

The inspiration of the Product Owner role was…