Scrum Roles

Scrum teams have three distinct roles. Each member has responsibilities to make the team successful. The Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development team make up the complete Scrum Team. Let’s dive into each role and discuss their duties.

Product Owner

According to the Scrum Guide ,”The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team.” They do this in various ways. One of their main responsibilities is the Product Backlog. The Product Owner must keep it properly ordered with the stakeholder’s desires.

This role asks a lot of this team member. Weighing the different stakeholder’s requests and deciding how to handle them requires some tough conversations. They must be available to the team. Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software puts it this way. “Product owners must be available to the team, and engage actively with it.” Mike is pointing out how this role needs to be an active team member. Some organizations have people do the Product Owner duties along with other things. This can be a challenge to do things correctly.

Scrum Master

The Scrum Master owns the Scrum process. They help coach and train the team how to use the process to achieve the goals they outline. Agile Alliance defines the role as, “The scrum master is the team role responsible for ensuring the team lives agile values and principles and follows the processes and practices that the team agreed they would use.” Some of the practices include scheduling the meetings and helping people understand what they must do.

As the development team encounters obstacles the Scrum Master steps in and removes them. Essentially keeping the team as productive as possible. They also need to address the team dynamics. Focusing on the relationships within the Development Team. Team success depends on these being strong. Also, the relationship with the Product Owner is essential too. Scrum Masters are protectors of the team. As outside parties try to derail their progress the Scrum Master must intervene.

Development Team

The Development Team creates the value in a Scrum Team. Where the other two roles support them. This team is comprised of technical professionals that complete “shippable” work each Sprint. The team should be self-organizing each choosing their work. There are no specialties. Work is completed in a cross-functional manner. Knowledge is transferred across the team, not kept to one person.

There is a lot of talk about Scrum team sizes. Where some cite the “two-pizza” rule, your team should be able to be fed by two pizzas. If it can’t it is too big. DAN RADIGAN Dan Radigan of Atlassian says this, “The most effective scrum teams are tight-knit, co-located, and usually 5 to 7 members.” Others have said it as 7 plus or minus 2 for a recommendation. Communication can get unwieldy in groups larger than nine.

Scrum Roles are well defined to enable a new team to develop quickly. The framework is not lengthy. Similar to the Agile Manifesto Scrum focuses on “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. The framework is a starting place. The team and organization can take things to another level as they inspect and adapt.

Originally posted on MyITCareerCoach.com