The Product Owner is available for work with Scrum

The Product Owner’s work mainly involves:

• being present at the Sprint Planning meeting. The Product Owner defines, together with the Developers, which Sprint Goal will be pursued during the Sprint and what work will be carried out to achieve this goal.
• being accessible and available to make decisions and answer the Developers’ questions about the product throughout the Sprint, whenever requested.
• interacting with the Developers so that together they can prepare the items for the next Sprint.
• being present together with the Developers at the Sprint Review meeting to obtain feedback from the product’s customers and other stakeholders on the work conducted during the Sprint.
• being present at the Sprint Retrospective meeting to help the Scrum Team improve its work and become more productive.
• interacting frequently with the customers and other stakeholders throughout the work to understand their business needs, get their feedback on work already delivered and update the Product Backlog with new information.

All these activities can demand a considerable amount of time from the Product Owner. In addition, there is no rule in Scrum that prevents the Product Owner from working on more than one Scrum Team at the same time, whether on the development of one or more products. Nevertheless, depending on the complexity and size of the products, this can become a very difficult task for a centralizing Product Owner. A Product Owner who is too busy, absent, and not available enough to fulfill her role can have disastrous consequences for the work.

Because of this, I reiterate that in more mature scenarios, the Product Owner can delegate the work of managing the Product Backlog, albeit partially, to the Developers. As such, in a scenario of scaled Scrum, delegating can be the solution to enable the work of a Product Owner with multiple teams.