Scrum Rules: The Product Owner Role

Product development requires problem-solving, innovation and creativity. But more than that, it requires problems, opportunities and a vision of the future. The Product Owner recognizes, gathers, organizes and presents these to the Scrum Team. The Product Owner exercises deep business intuition and insight.

A Product Owner that fails at their job doesn’t just create a poor product, they also put people out of work. The revenue that the product generates is the only sustainable source of funding for the work of the Scrum Team. Of course, a Scrum Team can get started with some initial seed funding or an investment of time. But ultimately Team Members gotta eat and a business selling a product has to make money.

The pressure on the Product Owner is immense. The Product Owner role in Scrum is the hardest to do well. It requires excellence at both a tactical and a strategic level. The role requires an incredible field of knowledge and experience. The role requires dealing with a huge array of people who want their problems solved now, not next Sprint. And the skills for doing all this are hard to transfer over to other people to relieve the pressure.

Fortunately, the Scrum Guide allows the Product Owner to rely heavily on the rest of the Scrum Team – even allowing other people to perform many of the aspects of the Product Owner role. But accountability for business results rests heavily and solely on the shoulders of person in the Product Owner role.

NOTE: If you are interested in learning more about the role of the Product Owner, consider taking a Certified Scrum Product Owner® course from us. These courses are offered virtually by BERTEIG and me and my co-trainers have real-world hands-on experience with Scrum and the Product Owner role.

Certified Scrum Product Owner® – Guaranteed to Run! ✅

All virtual learning events run from 9am to 4:30pm Toronto/New York time and are 100% virtual.  Both CSM and CSPO courses have approximately 2 hours of required pre-work through our e-learning portal, and require you to have high speed internet for Zoom video conferencing and Miro virtual white-boarding.

Maybe attending a virtual training session isn’t for you, but you would like to acknowledge that this article helped you out somehow…