(2010-12-23) Poppendieck Product Owner Problem

Mary Poppendieck sees serious confusion about the Scrum role of Product Owner and its fit with the classic role of Product Manager... In this company, the Product Managers found it impossible to handle both the customer-facing and team-facing jobs at the same time. So most teams had added an additional person to assist the Product Manager by preparing stories for the team, and called this person the Product Owner. The job of these Product Owners resembled the classic role of business analyst... Critical tradeoffs between business and technical issues often fell to these Scrum Product Owners, yet they had neither the first hand customer knowledge nor the in-depth technical knowledge to make such decisions wisely... Product Managers who lack the time, training, or temperament to handle both the customer-facing and the team-facing responsibilities of software development have two options. They can appoint Scrum Product Owners for each development team, or they can provide high-level guidance to a development team capable of designing the product and setting its own priorities. We observe that the second option generally works better, because an intermediary Product Owner brings a single perspective and limited time to the complex job of designing a product... The entire team needs to be part of the design decision process. Team members should have the level of knowledge of the problems and opportunities being addressed necessary for them to contribute their unique perspective to the product design.