As a Product Owner of one of my company’s service offerings I am responsible for the roadmap, the planning and realization of software releases for the solution. I have been confronted with the reality of the role and its complexity. Product ownership requires several skills which are just slightly related to each other, and a lot of times it means skills that you won’t often see united in one person. Having an IT background myself, part of my duty is easy: for instance getting information from stakeholders, breaking down this into meaningful User Stories or communicating the work to be done with the development team. However, managing the product from a marketing perspective is a healthy challenge for me. To find out who the main competitors are, where the biggest opportunities in the market lay , what should be offered to beat the competitors etc. Only by working together with others, in my case with sales and marketing team and end-user representatives, I can achieve my goal. If I want to do a good job, I have to think of product ownership as a team effort.