Product Owner

The Scrum Guide – 2020

The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.

The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes:

• Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal;
• Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items;
• Ordering Product Backlog items; and,
• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood.

The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.

For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions. These decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog, and through the inspectable Increment at the Sprint Review.

The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the needs of many stakeholders in the Product Backlog. Those wanting to change the Product Backlog can do so by trying to convince the Product Owner.

© 2020 Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland

Commentary

Organizations often struggle to fully understand this role and to choose the right person for it. The other two Scrum roles are way more straightforward. The Developers are certainly a group of experts working on building the increment. The Scrum Master is a trained and certified, experienced person dedicated to this role, with a good understanding of Agile principles, practices, and software and product development.

Who is the Product Owner?

Perhaps a business analyst, a “representative of business”? A key stakeholder or a quasi-project manager? Large, complex organizations rarely have a function that directly translates to this role, although, with the growing Agile maturity of the business world, this is changing. Fortunately, the Product Owner does not necessarily need to be an experienced Scrum practitioner. Experience certainly helps, but it is not critical. That is why the Scrum Master is responsible for supporting the Product Owner in Scrum-related questions (see Scrum Master Service to the Product Owner). On the other hand, this person must be an expert of the product, though may receive help from a business analyst (even though there is no such role in Scrum a ‘Developer’ can be a business analyst) or other stakeholders. Besides, this individual must be a trusted, perhaps senior person in the organization. We can interpret this role as an ‘entrepreneur within the organization’, or ‘the CEO of the product’.

There are similar roles in other Agile delivery frameworks, however, with subtle differences. For example, a Kanban Service Request Manager would find it convenient to adapt to the responsibilities of this role.

The Challenges of the Product Owner Role

The overarching statement that the Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team encapsulates two main challenges:

• Creating and evolving a product of value, and
• ensuring the team delivers the best it can each Sprint.

Creating a Product of Value

The Scrum Guide is not explicit about creating value. We can get some ideas from the Evidence Based Management Guide published on scrum.org. This is a mandatory read for Product Owners considering a certification, however, far from a complete description of the Product Owner’s businesswise work. Depending on the focus of work, the Product Owner may research the market, the competition, the legal environment, the technological landscape, etc. This may include interviewing business and technical stakeholders, conducting workshops, and collecting information from within the organization. As mentioned in the guide, the Product Owner can delegate some or all of these tasks to the Developers (e.g. to a Business Analyst).

People often interpret this section of the Scrum Guide as if the Product Owner could decide about everything. From Scrum’s point of view, this may even be true. However, in a complex organization, not even the CEO can decide about everything. The Product Owner is accountable for conducting the negotiations and formulating the decisions in the Product Backlog. If it is done, the entire organization must respect their decisions.

The Value Delivered by the Scrum Team

The value resulting from the Scrum Team’s work obviously also depends on the value of the product. The other part of the story is the implementation itself. Let’s suppose the Product Owner already sorted out which business goals are top priority and would generate the most value. However, we do not yet know their cost. The Product Owner therefore asks the Developers to guesstimate the items, giving them all the information they need, and negotiating the details with them. Knowing the cost and benefit of multiple Product Backlog items, the Product Owner can start to fill the Sprints with meaningful units while also considering the capacity of the Developers. We will see this in more detail in the Product Backlog management and Sprint Planning chapters.

Accountability and Responsibility

There is a subtle difference between accountability and responsibility in this context, where responsibility refers to something a person has to achieve (do) while accountability refers to the liability for the actions taken. To understand the difference better, let’s take a look at the RACI page of Wikipedia.

The Scrum Guide emphasizes that the Product Owner can delegate the responsibility but not the accountability for performing the PO tasks.

If you plan to sit for a PSPO exam, check out our Product Owner Study Guide for additional study material.

Test your knowledge!

Key Takeaways

• The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team.
• The PO is accountable for everything about the Product Backlog but can delegate the responsibility to the Developers.
• The PO is a person, 1 PO for 1 Product but for any number of Scrum Teams.
• The PO is the sole person to decide about the items and their rank in the Product Backlog – but usually based on stakeholder collaboration.

External content: Henrik Kniberg’s Agile Product Ownership – a must-watch