Product Owner’s Functional Manager
This doesn’t seem to be covered in any Scrum guide so sending out for experts’ thoughts.
In my hypothetical scenario, my company has five products and therefore five Product Owners.
From an organsisational point of view, what is better
1. Each “product” is a seperate team reporting to a functional manager. Therefore the PO, testers, scrum master and the developers all have the same functional manager.
2. We have all the Product Owners under one Functional Manager. All the developers under a seperate functional manager and so forth.
What value does having a functional manager add in this scenario?
From an organsisational point of view, what is better
The best thing is to accept that organizational change may be necessary if Scrum is to be implemented well. That includes challenging established roles and responsibilities such as “functional managers”, and cultural norms about teams “reporting” to managers or otherwise being “under” them.
I want to jump in here. The manager role in the Agile world is unclear. I'm practicing Agile in the last 4 years - the teams are self-organized and cross-functional, and still you need managers around. I don't like to have 1:1 ratio between line manager and a Scrum team, because it looks like the Scrum team is reporting to a manager and then the manager can abuse that.
In one of my projects, the managers were leading the technical teams (Community of Practice) and their team members were spread around the Scrum teams. This provided us the right balance between looking on technology (CoP) and delivery (Scrum).
In any case, managers are essentials. There are many tasks that fall outside of the Scrum domain - recruit, bonuses, HR issues, etc. I'm a strong believer that a person should have at least 30 minutes of 1-on-1 face-to-face time with his/her manager. The manager role is to build up the force, to talk with you on development plans, to encourage you, to be a listening hear for you. The fact that a line manager is not mention in the Scrum guide doesn't mean the Scrum objects to it.
+1 Erez