Scrum Methodology

9th
SEP

Scrum Product Owner

Posted by admin under Scrum Basics

There are three fundamental roles in the Scrum method of agile software development: the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the team. I’ll begin by discussing the Product Owner because it is the most demanding of the roles.

In Scrum, the Product Owner is the one person responsible for a project’s success. The Product Owner leads the development effort by conveying his or her vision to the team, outlining work in the scrum backlog, and prioritizing it based on business value. Of course, he or she must also consider the stakeholders (to make sure their interests are included in the release) and the team (to make sure the release is developed by the deadline and within budget). As such, the Product Owner must be available to the team to answer questions and deliver direction.

But this combination of authority and availability to the development team makes it hard for the Scrum Product Owner not to micro-manage. Scrum values self-organization and, as a result, the Product Owner must respect the team’s ability to create its own plan of action. This means that a Product Owner is forbidden to give the team more work in the middle of the sprint. Even if requirements change or a rival organization unveils a new product that renders the team’s work all for naught, the Scrum Product Owner is discouraged from altering the sprint until the next sprint planning meeting. However, the Product Owner may cancel a Sprint when necessary. One Product Owner I know cancels Sprints once or twice per year tops.

Furthermore, it is the Product Owner’s responsibility to consider which activities will produce the most business value. This means making tough decisions—that the team might not appreciate—during sprint planning. However, the Product Owner is the one person who must face the music if the project crashes and burns. Therefore, he or she must aggressively determine which features of a product are most important, when they are developed, etc. Just as the development team must produce the negotiated work for the Product Owner, the Product Owner must deliver the product to the customer.

The responsibilities of the Product Owner are also described about halfway through this video module:

posted by: scrum methodology

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

• Tweet

Reader's Comments

1. ZenAgile Roles: Agile Sensei « Zen Agile | October 19th, 2009 at 6:49 pm

   [...] I read about the roles in other agile approaches — Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Chief Architects, and Domain Experts — the essence of mentoring and passing on the way of [...]

2. Agile and Scrum « Architecture and Design | September 4th, 2010 at 12:45 pm

   [...] has three fundamental roles: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and team [...]

3. Produktägare i användarcentrerade agila projekt « Helt sonika | June 8th, 2011 at 4:15 am

   [...] ett traditionellt Scrum-team är produktägaren den som prioriterar vad som ska utvecklas, den som har en vision om en produkt och den som ska [...]

4. Doc List | June 13th, 2011 at 8:24 am

   “In Scrum, the Product Owner is the one person responsible for a project’s success.”

   Seriously? I think this is seriously overstated. There is no one person responsible for a project’s success, regardless of whether you are doing waterfall or agile, scrum or XP.

   There’s no question that there must be a Product Owner. But “the one person”? No.

5. Edwin Dando | October 2nd, 2011 at 7:33 pm

   There is a free Product Owner position description here http://www.clarus.co.nz/downloads/product-owner-job-description.html if it is of interest to anyone.

6. it is not the destination that matters, but the journey you take. « kellrodney | November 23rd, 2011 at 11:19 am

   [...] most successful technique we implemented to get our Product Owners (PO) to increase their involvement with our Agile process was to encourage a ticket writing [...]

7. Scrum – An Agile Process « arunkumarhn | December 8th, 2011 at 4:13 am

   [...] has three fundamental roles: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and team [...]

8. Why I really love SCRUM | Daniel R. Odio - Hardcore LifeHacker Entrepreneur in Silicon Valley | March 4th, 2012 at 8:03 pm

   [...] on the department) can last several hours and encompasses the entire team.  It’s where the project (or product) owner moves ideas out of the icebox and into the backlog based on the project’s requirements. [...]

9. The ScrumMaster Role « collinscrummaster | March 13th, 2012 at 9:39 am

   [...] are three fundamental roles in the Scrum method of agile software development: the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the team. The second role I’d like to examine is the ScrumMaster, who, [...]

10. Matt Pearcey | May 8th, 2012 at 1:30 pm

    “Even if requirements change or a rival organization unveils a new product that renders the team’s work all for naught, the Scrum Product Owner cannot alter the sprint until the next sprint planning meeting.”

    Really? So as a business owner expecting to see a benefit from adopting scrum, you’re telling me that I need to invest in a whole bunch of work that will be thrown away simply to maintain the purity of the process?? Come on! I’ll wager that if it is your dollars being wasted on your team doing pointless work, you’d soon adopt a more pragmatic view.

    It’s a good approach, and works well in my experience, but it’s throwaway comments like this that immediately put the barriers up.

11. CASE/Teamarbete – delkurs 6, 17-18 december 2012 « PHP-utvecklare | January 6th, 2013 at 9:20 am

    [...] jobbar på varsin modern webbyrå och fick vart och ett tillfälle att träffa den tänkta kunden/produktägaren för Trader-projektet. Detta var webbyråns första kontakt med den potentiella kunden, Olle Nider, [...]

12. ewok_bbq | January 7th, 2013 at 8:31 am

    some Swedish stuff – I think.

13. Stella | January 18th, 2013 at 5:28 pm

    Can there be more than 1 product owner? If the product is complicated and the requirements challenging, can’t there be a team of product owners?

14. ewok_bbq | January 19th, 2013 at 2:43 pm

    Thanks Stella for the question. we can set up things in a number of ways. One way is to have 1 Product Owner (PO) per 1 Scrum Team working against 1 or more product backlogs. If you have multiple teams working against 1 or more backlogs then yes you will end up with multiple POs working together. This means that that there will indeed be a heirarchy to that group with a “uber-PO” at the top. Bas Vodde and Craig Larman write about it at great detail in their book here. The other way to do this is to have 1 PO across multiple teams but I haven’t seen that work in practice very well so I wouldn’t really recommend it.

15. Edward | May 11th, 2013 at 3:43 pm

    @Matt,

    The “whole bunch of work that will be thrown away” would be the work that you (or your PO) just told the team to do. In extreme situations, as the article states, the PO may cancel the sprint. But if this becomes frequent, perhaps your sprint length should be shortened, or practice better judgement on what you put into the sprint.

16. ewok_bbq | May 12th, 2013 at 8:00 am

    Thanks Edward for the response.

Leave a Reply