Who does what role in scrum?
aka
This Organizational Chart is a Figment of your imagination.
Life is full of epiphanies, but some are more amazingly simple than others.
Scrum roles… it’s very simple.
There is one product owner. This is the customer. They wantsomething.
There is one scrum master. This is the coach, facilitator,and a shepherd.
There is a team. These are the people who can make the thing the customer wants. Not just the builders, but everyone who can make what thecustomer wants.
It’s that simple… however org charts are rarely that simple in larger organizations.
Forget them. Seriously. Pretend it doesn’t exist.
Just strike this completely out of your head.
Let me explain briefly why:
QA manager… are they a product owner? Nope. I won’t get intothe how and why but unless they are programming, analyzing requirements or testing, they aren’t a part of the scrum team.
Development manager… are they a product owner? Nope. Same asabove.
Product manager… are they a product owner? This one is a lot more tricky… well they give us the requirements. They often tell us what weneed to make. They probably even would come to a scrum planning meeting and act like a product owner… saying where to go, what to do, what the priority ofthings are. However, if you listen closely… very closely… they don’t have all of the requirements. They’re merely parroting what they’ve heard someone else say. They’re merely giving you an echo of someone elses desires. Granted, they could be making up some requirements of their own and getting them in… is that what the real customer wants?
So product manager… no
Relationship manager… this is unique to my work I think but maybe other companies have this. Supposedly this relationship manager is the person who brings in all the stakeholders and their goals and is the 1 single wringable neck for how things get prioritized and worked on. Sure sounds like aproduct owner doesn’t it?
Nope. I say no.
You are probably thinking “WTF?”
Here’s a news flash. This relationship manager… they aren’tgoing to come to your scrum meeting. They aren’t going to know the actual requirements for the one epic that they prioritized as number 1 this release. They aren’t going to have the foggiest clue what to do when you say the farkle won’t feebozzle in schneezle so do you have an alternative to feebozzling it? They'll say, hmm let me get back to you on that... or i need to talk to "Fred" (ding, Fred should maybe be your PO?)
So who is the product owner for your scrum team?
GOOD QUESTION.
You are probably sitting there with a vision statement…requirements document… business case… some sort of piece of paper with an ‘DRAFT’ stamped across the front page and a “Confidential” background on every page.
You are staring at the the translation of the real productowner’s words!
OK, So who are they?
Go to the product manager and say “hey, this document… whowrote this?”
Go to the writer of the document and say “Hey, who told you this stuff?”
And keep doing all this and that until you find the real person who wants this product change… and then you simply say to them.
Hey, can I borrow you for 3-4 hours to do sprint planning on such and such day? Can you be available for the next 30 days to answer questions about this thing you want? We hear it’s really important to you and we’re finally working on it!
Let me know what they say.
If you like how this works… go thank Mike Vizdos for this amazing epiphany he gave me.
http://www.michaelvizdos.com/telephone/index.html