Knowledge Base / Scrum Team / Product Owner / How is the Product Owner?
The Product Owner is unique
The accountability of the Product Owner belongs to only one person on a Scrum Team. In other words, the Developers relate to one and only one Product Owner.
The existence of more than one Product Owner interacting with the Developers would potentially generate doubts and conflicts about who has decision-making power over the product under development. If there were disagreements, for example, the Developers would not know who to listen to and therefore the decision process involving the product would become unnecessarily slow and confusing.
Similarly, the existence of substitute Product Owners who would appear with some frequency when the Product Owner cannot be present, or some kind of rotation of Product Owners, could confuse the Developers and the product definition work itself. As in the previous situation, different expectations and interpretations from different Product Owners could make it impossible to understand and implement certain items, and thus realize the Sprint Goal.
Possible absences of the Product Owner due to illness or vacation, however, are infrequent or exceptional situations. In such cases there is generally no better solution other than to simply replace the PO provisionally, even with the Developers’ own work. In this sense, substitutes are used only when it is strictly necessary.
Moreover, there is not, at the same time, a Product Owner for the customer and another for the organization that is developing the product, working as a representative or as a channel of communication. Nor is there, at the same time, a business Product Owner and a technical Product Owner. Both are dysfunctions that I often see with clients. The Product Owner is unique: either she is a person chosen by the customer, or she is a person chosen by the vendor.
The Product Owner is also not a committee or a department of the organization. Groups of people, even if they make single and centralized decisions, generally take a very long time to reach them and their members can be accessed individually and express different opinions. With a unique Product Owner, the Developers deal with only one focus for making product decisions and clarifying doubts.
The Product Owner is the only person who has accountability for managing the Product Backlog. Her decisions about what will be implemented in the product should be respected, and no one other than the PO can change the implementation order established by her.
To carry out his work, however, the Product Owner is advised, influenced, and supported by the Developers, who are able to do their work better the more mastery they have of the product’s business. The Product Owner also interacts frequently with the customers, other stakeholders and whoever else she deems necessary.
To develop larger products, there may be a need for multiple Scrum Teams working together. Nevertheless, even in these cases, there will still only be one Product Owner common to these teams and ordering a single Product Backlog.
Definition: Unique Product Owner
The Product Owner is unique and thus there is no:
- one Product Owner for the team and another Product Owner for the customer;
- one technical Product Owner and one business Product Owner;
- one proxy Product Owner and one real Product Owner;
- a committee of Product Owners.