The Scrum Guide is short on the "how." It says the Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. That's intentionally vague — because the how is context-dependent.
In practice, being a PO comes down to three things you have to get right simultaneously:
Own the backlog. Not manage it. Not write tickets. Own it — meaning you decide what's in it, in what order, and why. The backlog is your product strategy made concrete. If stakeholders can't look at it and understand where the product is going, it's not doing its job.
Represent the user, not the business. There's a difference between what stakeholders ask for and what users need. The PO sits at that intersection and is supposed to hold both. In my experience on the LPT project — a legacy e-commerce platform — the BA role was very close to a proxy PO. The biggest challenge wasn't writing stories. It was helping clients understand that their requests and their users' actual needs were two different things.
Make decisions. The Scrum Guide says the PO is one person, not a committee. That's not a bureaucratic detail — it's the mechanism that prevents backlog paralysis. Someone has to be able to say yes or no, and that person is the PO.
For PSPO I, understand the PO's accountability boundaries. For PSPO II, the exam tests complex stakeholder and organizational dynamics — what happens when the PO's authority is undermined, or when organizational structure fights against good product decisions.
Exam tip: Any scenario where management overrides the PO's backlog ordering is an anti-pattern. The PO is accountable for ordering — stakeholders can influence that, but not override it.