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What are the three scrum roles?Scrum has three roles: product owner, scrum master and the development team members. While this is pretty clear, what to do with existing job titles can get confusing. Many teams ask if they need to change their titles when adopting scrum. The short answer is no. In this article we’ll define scrum roles and how you can fold them into your organization, without printing new business cards. Scrum roles vs. job titlesThe three scrum roles describe the key responsibilities for those on the scrum team. They aren’t job titles. This means that any job title, even your existing ones, can perform one of the roles. Because the essence of scrum is empiricism, self-organization, and continuous improvement, the three roles give a minimum definition of responsibilities and accountability to allow teams to effectively deliver work. This allows teams to take responsibility for how they organize and to keep improving themselves.
The development team should be able to self-organize so they can make decisions to get work done. Think of a development team as similar to a production support team that is called in during the night because something has gone wrong. The development team, like the production support team, can make decisions and deliver the fix/value for the problem at hand. Self-organization isn’t about disrespecting the organization, but rather about empowering the people closest to the work to do what’s needed to solve the problem. The development team’s responsibilities include:
The product owner: Setting clear directionAgile teams are, by design, flexible and responsive, and it is the responsibility of the product owner to ensure that they are delivering the most value. The business is represented by the product owner who tells the development what is important to deliver. Trust between these two roles is crucial. The product owner should not only understand the customer, but also have a vision for the value the scrum team is delivering to the customer. The product owner also balances the needs of other stakeholders in the organization. So the product owner must take all these inputs and prioritize the work. This is probably their most important responsibility because conflicting priorities and unclear directions will not only reduce the effectiveness of the team, but also could break the important trust relationship that the business has with the development team. Agile teams are designed to inspect and adapt. That means a change in priority may lead to a massive change to the team structure, work products, as well as the end result. It is, therefore, crucial for scrum teams to be successful and that only one person sets priority. That person is the product owner. The Scrum Guide defines the product owners responsibilities as:
The scrum master: Holding it all togetherThe scrum master is the role responsible for gluing everything together and ensuring that scrum is being done well. In practical terms, that means they help the product owner define value, the development team deliver the value, and the scrum team to get to get better. The scrum master is a servant leader which not only describes a supportive style of leadership but describes what they do on a day-to-day basis. They serve the product owner by helping them better understand and communicate value, to manage the backlog, help them plan the work with the team and break down that work to deliver the most effective learning. Serving the development team, the scrum master helps them self-organize, focus on outcomes, get to a “done increment,” and manage blockers. The scrum master also serves the organization at large, helping them understand what scrum is and create an environment that supports scrum. The scrum master focuses on:
The scrum master serves the product owner in sprint planning and sprint reviews, ensuring that value is clearly being described and direction set. They serve the development team in the daily scrum by ensuring that work is happening and that blockers are being removed. They also take responsibility for blockers that are outside of the team's ability to resolve. The scrum master ensures that every opportunity to improve is made transparent to the scrum team and the retrospective has a clear set of outcomes that can be executed. Get started with agile scrum rolesThe three scrum roles are pretty simple in describing the three major areas of responsibility on any scrum team, but often it is hard to map them to your own job title. So here is a starter:
Dave West Dave West is the product owner and CEO at scrum.org. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports. He also is the co-author of two books, The Nexus Framework For Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. Reach out to Dave on twitter @DavidJWest Which scrum role is primarily responsible for owning and updating product backlog?One of the most important responsibilities for a scrum product owner is managing the product backlog. This is the development team's project to-do list. The product owner's responsibility is to create the list of backlog items and prioritize them based on the overall strategy and business objectives.
Which scrum role is responsible for the product backlog?In most cases, the product owner (or product manager) holds responsibility for organizing and maintaining the product backlog.
Who is responsible to update the product backlog and ensure the user stories are refined?Every member of the Scrum Team is responsible for Product Backlog Refinement: The Product Owner: building the right thing; The Developers: building the thing right; The Scrum Master: ensuring feedback and empiricism throughout these activities.
Who is primarily responsible for creating and prioritizing the product backlog?A Product Owner Prioritizes the Product Backlog
One of the most important roles in Scrum is the prioritization of the product backlog. This is done solely by the product owner, who considers a variety of business factors and influences when making those decisions.
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