

Class Registration
…you are not doing Scrum. Recently, I had given a number of Scrum Lead classes to people interested in change. Invariably when you get a bunch of people together who are dealing with the same organizational obstacles, they want to know why the organization has had so much difficulty in adopting Scrum. After oberving a number of people who have attended my class apply Scrum, there is one consistent thread with all these Teams: no Product Owners.
The Product Owner is responsible for executing on the Vision for the product and this is manifested through the Product Backlog – the central planning artifact in Scrum. The Product Backlog is simply a list of all the functional and non-functional requirements for the product. It is just all the stuff that needs to be done to release the product. It can have lots of structure or very little; it is up to your environment and how much process ceremony your organization requires\is comfortable with. The Product Owner is also the gatekeeper of what goes into the Product Backlog and their priorities. As Ken Schwaber likes to say, and I am paraphrasing here, “The Product Owner is the single wringable neck”.
So how does this relate to my observations? Teams without Product Owners tend not to execute Scrum very well in a number of key ways:
Scrum is a very simple framework with clear roles. Missing one of the key roles creates an imbalance in the system, a very serious imbalance. I used to say that if you cannot find a Product Owner then maybe you should just cancel the project, i.e. if the organization cannot dedicate an individual to the product, then maybe the product is not that valuable to begin with (which is useful information to know). I’ve changed my mind on that statement – maybe the work is still valuable, but Scrum is not the right vehicle for implementation.
[Alternatively, you could also title this post “Without a Customer it is not XP” and all the same concepts apply – CEN]