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Several PO

Last post 11:39 am August 8, 2014 by aldo daniel lavin
3 replies
aldo daniel lavin
11:12 pm August 2, 2014

HI.

Can exist several PO? I mean... If I would develop a complete solution (finances, accounting, inventory)... must exist only one PO? can be one for each field (finances, inventory, etc)? I am a little confuse. I ask for some one who has power in decitions making and has the same view of the client, but... maybe he don't know all the areas.

What to do here?

Thanks in advance.

Ludwig Harsch
04:45 am August 4, 2014

Hi,
if you do plain Scrum, you have one PO for one product.
But you can scale Scrum for situations where more than 9 people are developing a product. So you will have several development teams for the requirement areas (finances, inventory, etc), but still one Product Owner and one Product Backlog. When you do this, it can happen that the Product Owner is not able to follow his responsibility for all the teams (probably this will happen with 10 teams, but not yet with 2 teams). Now you will need Area Product Owners in the respective teams for your requirement areas.
Remember:
1. There is still only one person ultimately accountable for the product, the Product Owner
2. Area Product Owners are not part of plain Scrum as described in the Scrum Guide, but a good practice for scaling Scrum. In particular, it is no justification for having a Proxy Product Owner in a plain Scrum team and call him "Area Product Owner for the area of requirements engineering".
For details how to scale Scrum, see http://www.crosstalkonline.org/storage/issue-archives/2013/201305/20130…

Ian Mitchell
05:55 am August 4, 2014

The identity of the Product Owner should be clear to all team members at all times. Product ownership becomes broken when this is not the case, or when the identified PO fails to perform the associated duties.

We have to be wary of any attempt to tamper with the product ownership model...regardless of whether it is offered as an "area" or "proxied" form of representation. As the Scrum Guide says, a PO is not a committee. If a team has more than one authority representing product ownership at any point during any one sprint then product ownership is definitely broken.

Sometimes a "senior" PO is put in charge, and who notionally arbitrates between area representatives or proxies should confusion or disagreement arise. That is still a broken model. The Product Owner role should be seamless, and represented as such to the rest of the Scrum Team.

aldo daniel lavin
11:39 am August 8, 2014

Thanks!!! all clear now

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