The Product Owner is competent to define the product

The Product Owner defines what will be implemented for the product, Increment by Increment, in order to optimize the value of the work performed by the Scrum Team. In making the necessary decisions, we do not expect the Product Owner to know everything about the product under development in advance. After all, the actual details of the product emerge throughout its development. They are “moving targets,” as the Product Owner defines what to implement next based on the use of the product and frequent feedback from the customers, users, and other stakeholders.

As I stated in the section Manages the definition of the product in this chapter, the Product Owner is empowered to make decisions regarding what will be implemented that she considers the most appropriate at any given moment, as long as they are aligned with the Product Goal. Thus, she is not an intermediary for the product’s customers, but makes decisions with the goal of meeting the needs of these customers. The Product Owner fully assumes this accountability, as she understands that if she simply obeyed the customers’ wishes and thus acted as a kind of order taker, she would not be able to maximize the value generated by the Scrum Team.

In many contexts, however, it is not uncommon for the Product Owner not to have a great deal of knowledge at the beginning about the business in which the product is inserted. In these cases, the Product Owner builds the necessary knowledge gradually throughout the work, continually defining what should be implemented in order to generate the next greatest value. For example, a scenario where this is common involves product development for an external customer, when the Product Owner comes from the vendor.

Notwithstanding, we expect the Product Owner to always to be prepared to quickly make sufficiently well-directed decisions, anticipating possible doubts about what will be implemented next, consulting with whoever may be appropriate, when appropriate, and relying on the feedback she will soon receive to make the necessary adjustments.

In this sense, the Scrum framework inherently mitigates the risks of significant waste and consequent losses arising from wrong decisions by the Product Owner. In addition to the high visibility of the Product Backlog contents and its ordering, the quality of the Product Owner’s decisions becomes visible rapidly and frequently through the Sprint Review meetings held for each Sprint and the actual use of what is released to the users.