Big part of the Product Owner role is to establish the mission and vision for their teams work efforts. Spending time explaining the customer, their needs, and the role the teams’ efforts will play in meeting those needs. Setting a tone of not just delivery, but customer satisfaction and problem solutions.
In the first question above, there was talk about connecting the Roadmap to the Backlog. What was missing in that question was the:
The vision of the Product Owner
Teams Mission
Customer personas – so that the team can ENVISION the customer’s challenges and needs
Permission to experiment and learn about how best to solve these needs
Intangibles, perhaps things that weren’t even asked for, that would delight the customer
It’s helping the team to understand these aspects and then to deliver “towards them” that I think can be truly motivational and inspirational.