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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