Scrum – Understanding Roles and Responsibilities

Product Owner Responsibilities

1. Manages stakeholders

• Collaborates with the business stakeholders
• Facilitates meaningful conversations in case of multiple customer voices
• Balances scope and schedule targets, keeping in mind team’s current capability

2. Helps develop Profitable Products

• Learns to ensure deep knowledge about product, domain and competition
• Develops the product vision and product strategy
• Creates and maintains the Product Roadmap
• Tracks the product progress using relevant metrics

3. Maintains the Product Backlog

• Creates stories and keeps acceptance criteria up to date
• Ensures stories are INVEST
• Prioritizes stories based on business value and risk

4. Collaborates with the Dev Team

• Conveys the product vision and roadmap
• Makes the product backlog transparent to the team
• Ensures team gets an opportunity to understand business requirements well before they commit to it
• Respects team’s current capability and balances demand accordingly
• Is available to the team on priority basis
• Resolves requirement clarifications in a timely manner
• Reviews work done by team and provides timely feedback

Scrum Master Responsibilities

1. Serves the Product Owner

• Helps Product Owner gain a deeper understanding of Agile
• Helps ensure that goals, scope, and product domain are understood by all team members
• Finds techniques for effective Product Backlog management
• Ensures Product Owner knows how to arrange the Product Backlog to maximize value
• Facilitates release planning and sprint planning

2. Serves the Development Team

• Helps team gain a deeper understanding of Agile values, principles and practices
• Coaches the Team in self-organization and cross-functionality
• Helps the Development Team in creating high-value products
• Facilitates team meetings to ensure healthy team participation
• Helps team develop a sense of urgency without compromising quality
• Removes impediments to the Development Team’s progress

3. Serves the Organization

• Leads and coaches the organization in its Agile adoption
• Helps organization gain a deeper understanding of Agile
• Helps organization understand the idea of empirical product development
• Employs a change strategy that maximizes value while minimizing resistance
• Collaborates with other Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches to increase the overall effectiveness of Agile transition

Dev Team Responsibilities

1. Maintains a Trusting and Open environment

• Team members trust and respect each other’s capability
• Team handles contradictory views in a mature manner, without them becoming lingering conflicts

2. Works in a transparent and accountable manner

• Team visualizes their work using a task board (physical or electronic) that they keep live all the time
• Team members openly share information and knowledge with others
• Team tracks progress of their work using well-established metrics that are visible to all
• Team members raise impediments in a timely manner
• Team members proactively pull work based on their capacity

3. Self-organizes around their work commitments

• Team members collaborate with each other throughout the day to ensure work items are completed without delay
• Team members working on the same item meet often to share ideas and validate their understanding
• Team members reach out to others for help (without hesitance) if they get stuck in their work
• Team members help (without delay) those who get stuck in their work

4. Owns the product/service delivery

• Team members try to finish their work with a sense of urgency
• Team members consciously focus on finishing work that is already in progress before starting new work
• Team members proactively find ways to improve code and control technical debt
• Team members look beyond their individual tasks and focus on completing work items
• Team members pay special attention to work items with higher business priority or value

5. Owns the development process and strives to enhances it continuously

• Team members openly discuss ways to improve the current way of working
• Team meets regularly (kaizen events) to discuss possible improvements in how they work and how they could improve
• Team members take improvement ideas seriously and implement most of them before the next kaizen event