Foreword

The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.

The Product Owner is also accountable for effective Product Backlog management, which includes:

• Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal;

• Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog items;

• Ordering Product Backlog items; and,

• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible, and understood.

The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.

For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions. These decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog, and through the inspectable Increment at the Sprint Review.

The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the needs of many stakeholders in the Product Backlog. Those wanting to change the Product Backlog can do so by trying to convince the Product Owner.

—Scrum Guide 2020¹

1. https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#product-owner

For many organizations, the accountabilities of Product Ownership are a challenge. When discussing the subject, people working in those organizations ask questions like, “Is a Product Owner a Business Analyst?” or “Is the Product Owner a Product Manager from the business?” The reality is that when organizations adopt Scrum, there is a mindset change that might make it hard to fit into an existing organizational structure. Ultimately, these organizations are wrestling with the idea that someone will be accountable for ensuring that the work on the product will be the most valuable. Single accountability in most organizations does not fit. They want groups of people, hierarchies, processes, controls, and governance to ensure that the right thing will be done. Or, if there is a mistake, everyone, which means no one, is accountable for that mistake. The Product Owner was introduced to Scrum to enable teams to deliver stuff and to remove the impediment of traditional organizational decision making. The purpose is clear, but the details are vague. How does the Product Owner decide what is most valuable? What does the Product Owner do every day? How do they interact with stakeholders and the team? How many teams do they support?

Those questions are tough to answer because the application of Scrum is so varied, and context matters. For example, a Product Owner at a genetic research organization will need a very different set of skills from one at a bank or retail organization. Also, how Scrum is being used in each organization will be different. For some organizations, Scrum teams are connected directly to customers and have the autonomy to deliver value directly. For others, Scrum teams are part of an elaborate and complex release process comprising tens of teams working toward connected, dependent goals. Each situation will encourage a different focus and approach to ordering value and working with the team.

But there is a set of skills from which all Product Owners need to draw. And more importantly, those skills can be grouped into stances that provide context and boundaries. Stances are a fun way to describe the approach the Product Owner takes. I was first introduced to the preferred and misunderstood stances of the Product Owner by Chris and Robbin when we developed the Professional Scrum Product Owner-Advanced course for Scrum.org. These stances became a great way to teach the ideas of Product Ownership and form a bridge to Product Management. They also can enable Product Owners in challenging situations to clarify what is essential.

For example, in a complex, multi-team environment where the Product Owner is more of an order taker than an order maker, the stance of the Visionary can add some clarity to how the Product Owner supports the backlog helping the team to at least understand the context of the Product Backlog items. Using the Visionary stance will not change the situation for the Product Owner, but it will encourage the use of additional skills that might help the team see more context in the Product Backlog items they receive. By applying the stances, a Product Owner will slowly expand their reach.

Each stance includes connections to product management, Lean UX, Lean Startup, Coaching, Facilitation, and other bodies of work. This illustrates the breadth of skills a good Product Owner can draw on to drive value effectively. It is also ironic that the description in the Scrum Guide, four paragraphs and one bulleted list, can introduce so much. But that is the power of Scrum as described by the often-used phrase “easy to learn, hard to master.”

In this book, Chris and Robbin present a comprehensive list of the stances and skills a Product Owner can use. They present great examples that illustrate both the challenge of Product Owners and the value that can come from excellent Product Ownership. As the Product Owner of Scrum.org, I have applied many practical examples and ideas from the book. Reading the book also made me refresh my focus, which often gets sidetracked by detail and distractions. Value is my destination, but other things often confuse and obscure my route. In this book, Chris and Robbin have presented a flashlight, or six flashlights, that can help me find my way to delivering more value for my organization.

The accountabilities of the Product Owner are not easy to master, and maybe you will never master them. From personal experience, I still wrestle with balance, focus, and communication, and I have been on this path for many years. But with every excellent increment, delivered Sprint Goal, and every Product Goal realized, you are changing the world! Good luck, and enjoy the book.

Dave West

CEO & Product Owner, Scrum.org

December 2022