Scrum Roles

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

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