We do Scrum But…
Are you serious? — Episode 39
“Our Scrum Teams have a Product Owner, a Scrum Master and the Development Team. Every Product Owner serves one Scrum Team”.
What is wrong about this statement?
Well, it starts with the fact that the Product Owner doesn’t serve a team but instead is responsible to maximize the value of the product:
“The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team.” — SG
Some may be confused by the part ‘of the Development Team’. This could suggest that the Product Owner works with one team only. This is NOT what it means. The Scrum Guide uses this type of wording more often. This wording doesn’t exclude the fact that a Product Owner may have to work with more than one Scrum Team. Fortunately there’s a very clear passage in the Scrum Guide to confirm this:
“Multiple Scrum Teams often work together on the same product. One Product Backlog is used to describe the upcoming work on the product.” — SG
And if you add this:
“The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog.” — SG
And:
“The Product Owner is one person, not a committee.” — SG
It is clear that:
A product has one Product Backlog
Multiple Teams can work on the same product
Only one Product Owner is responsible for the Product Backlog
This implies that when teams work together on the same product that they work with one Product Owner only.
It certainly is possible that each team within the company serves a specific product which then automatically means that the Product Owner to Scrum Team ratio is 1:1. But I see two possible issues here:
1 — Instead of making a division on products the Product Backlogs are separated by technical component.
The problem with this is that it misses the point of Scrum altogether:
“Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products.” — SG
And:
“… to deliver Increments of potentially releasable functionality that adhere to the Scrum Team’s current definition of “Done”.” — SG
This can be achieved by:
“Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team.” — SG
If you have Product Backlogs based on horizontal slices then you basically are introducing needless complexity which increases the need for coordination. On top of that you are depending on other teams to be able to deliver a “Done” increment.
2 — A product is being split in multiple functional components that could never be separate independent products
Suppose you have a product ‘Online Banking app’. Considering the range of options that can raise the value of this product you can easily have more Scrum Teams working on the Product Backlog. You could imagine that there would be a team focusing on the user interface of the app, another one on the payment functionality and yet another one on the mortgage functionality.
Many organisations tend to slice the products up in multiple parts.
In the case of the ‘Online Banking app’ you then may see different Product Backlogs for ‘Online Banking app user interface’, ‘Online Banking app Payment’ and ‘Online Banking app Mortgage’. For a company these may be separate technical products/components. However they are part of a whole and they all serve the same market. Mike Cohn suggests to define a product as broad as possible while serving no more than one market. See below a link to his article “What is a Product”:
What Is a Product?
If you work on a Scrum team, you undoubtedly know you should have a product backlog and product owner. But what…www.mountaingoatsoftware.com
With this in mind I would argue that the online banking app is ONE product. If you have only one product, why would you have separate Product Backlogs and as a result separate Product Owners to have one per Scrum Team?
Bottom Line
More often than not the Product Owner to Scrum ratio of 1:1 hints towards an anti-pattern. Are Product Owners working on a product or merely on a component? Do people within the organisation really grasp Scrum? Because Scrum only sees a Product Owner to Product Backlog ratio of 1:1 and acknowledges that multiple teams can work from the same Product Backlog.
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