Ralph Jocham
& Don McGreal

Most companies have a vision, an idea about market trends, and strategies to attract new customers as well as to retain existing ones. Most companies using Scrum have a capable workforce experienced in creating, releasing, and sustaining products. In theory, great business strategies executed by great Scrum Teams breed success. In practice, this is rarely the case.

A closer look reveals how a main issue lies with the Scrum Masters’ approach to Scrum. Many Scrum Masters turn their focus inward to the Development Team exclusively. They give priority to team cross-functionality, team building, technology choices, development process, and protecting the Development Team from outside influence. These are important and noble causes, but only addressing Scrum as a team process and overlooking the actual connection to the company’s vision and (product) strategies results in an organizational disconnect. We refer to this disconnect as the product management vacuum in our book, The Professional Product Owner (Pearson, 2018).

All vacuums have an innate tendency to fill themselves. If not actively addressed, the product management vacuum tends to get filled with documents, milestones, project charters, and other process artifacts. This creates an activity-driven, document-based, sequential process with many handoffs, resulting in loss of time, understanding, and quality. This practice has process compliance as its focal point, creating the fallacy of seeking to answer the question: are we on time and on budget? This kind of output measurement leaves aside customer value by ignoring the outcome, as each manager and each team is gauged against their ability to comply with the plan (and the bureaucracy).

To avoid a disconnect between management and the Development Team when planning a new product or working on product enhancements, the Scrum Master needs to work with the Product Owner to make sure that the product management vacuum is filled wisely, with the three Vs: Vision, Value, and Validation, as shown in the following figure.

A product needs a Vision that is clear about solving a customer need. If done well, this will rally stakeholders and the Development Team around a product strategy, increasing engagement and creativity and emphasizing Value.

In Scrum, Value is only determined in the actual marketplace. It requires the product to be released into users’ hands for actual, real-world work. Everything beforehand is hypothesis-driven inventory—a guess. Value is therefore rather subjective and depends on the ability to quickly analyze and synthesize the feedback. Empirical feedback loops should allow Validation by the marketplace for reasons of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. However, Value also requires a tight collaboration between the Product Owner and the Development Team for both to fully understand the purpose of their work and appreciate each other’s concerns. Scrum Masters should help Product Owners understand that until they release, there is no Value, only cost. Even if the perceived Value isn’t there, that is still good Validation that the strategy should likely change direction. The shorter this feedback loop, the sooner and more often we create Value.

The filling of the product management vacuum is in the hands of the Product Owner, as they function as the catalyst between the company’s strategy and product delivery—a task that will only succeed with the true support of the Scrum Master.