Agile Scrum: Why do we need a Product Owner?

Target Audience: Agile Scrum Enthusiasts
product

Agile Scrum stresses upon 3 specific and vital roles:

  • Feature Team
  • Scrum Master
  • Product Owner

Simply put, Feature Team comprises of the team members who shall develop and deliver the product. The Scrum Master is a facilitator who ensures all the ‘rituals’ are followed.

But do we really need a Product Owner? Isn’t the Business Team good enough?
What we are really trying to ask is:

“We have an Implementation Team and a Business Team. Do we need another discipline called Product Team?”

Let us try to answer that with an example:

child

Let us assume there is a child who needs to eat and study; eating to stay healthy and studying to further their education. And that the child can only do one of those two things at a given time.

teacher

So, we have a teacher who is responsible for educating the child. For obvious reasons, teachers (with education as their Key Responsibility Area or KRA) would like to emphasize on education alone and make the child read as much as possible.

And a cook responsible for feeding the child. On a similar note, the cook (with feeding quantity as their KRA) would be interested in feeding the child as much as possible.

Given a free hand to both, the results can be both disastrous and chaotic!

Thus emerges the need of a parent – with the sole purpose of the child’s overall well-being.

The Parent shall exercise an ultimate authority to decide what quantity and quality of food, and how much studying is best for the child.

It is a very critical role where one needs to strike a balance between alternatives, make decisions considering the big picture and (re)prioritize regularly to suit the situation at hand.

The success (i.e. the holistic growth of the child) is only possible if every other discipline respects the parent’s decision.

Back to Agile Scrum:

You might have guessed by now, if we make the following substitutions, need and importance of a full-time Product Owner role becomes more than obvious.

child

Child = Product

Cook = Stake Holders/ Sponsors/ Business Development

Teacher = Feature Team Members

Parent = Product Owner

product owner plant

References

  1. What is a Product Owner?

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