Why You Need Both a Scrum Master and Product Owner on an Agile Team

Co-Authors:

Phil Morehead - Product Operations Lead

Ted Tomoyasu - Agile Operations Lead

A four-person Olympic bobsled team includes a driver, a brakeman, and two “push athletes.” Their goal is to finish the course as quickly and safely as possible. All four run and push the sled, and each team member is trained and primed for speed. But it’s the driver’s job to strategize about how to approach the course and navigate each turn, and it’s the brakeman’s job to manage friction - to achieve maximum speed while ensuring haste doesn’t endanger the team or its objective.

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Much like a bobsled team, an agile software development team is also built for speed. The Product Owner acts like the bobsled driver, owning the vision, doing the planning, seeking the fastest pathways to value and anticipating the curves ahead. The Scrum Master is the brakeman, responsible for making certain that the “push athletes” in the development team are following and accelerating the agile process, but also that speed doesn’t come at the expense of extra bumps and unnecessary friction. Without both a Product Owner and a Scrum Master, an agile team’s effectiveness can suffer. 

“What value does this bring to the customers that we’re supporting and how does it map up to our overall vision?”

What does a Product Owner do?

A Product Owner’s primary responsibility is building products that customers love. Product owners need to fully understand the problems the product is solving for each stakeholder, what it needs to do today, and how it must evolve in the future. They gather market research and user stories to determine which products and features to improve or build. They spend a lot of time working with the business, including with upper management, determining and aligning stakeholder priorities. Product Owners reconcile all the demands from users and stakeholders and crystallize the product vision. They convey that vision to the development team alongside a precise roadmap for achieving it. They bring technical fluency, are committed to understanding the end-user and are laser-focused on delivering business value. They make themselves available to the full team nearly constantly. They lead adaptation for the agile team - changes in priority may require changes to the architecture, product features, even team structure. They manage the product backlog, keep records of changes and ensure that the highest priority work is the first into production. On a day-to-day basis, the Product Owner sequences tasks and weighs priorities by asking the question “what value does this bring to the customers that we’re supporting and how does it map up to our overall vision?”

Scrum Masters are inaptly named because while responsible for a lot, they are the master of nothing.

What does a Scrum Master do?

Scrum Masters are inaptly named because while responsible for a lot, they are the master of no one. They are servant leaders that act as coaches who remove obstacles, help resolve conflict and ensure that the team is following agreed processes and working with agile principles in mind. They are responsible and accountable for setting up key scrum meetings, from daily standups to sprint reviews, and facilitating those key meetings during a scrum cycle so they are efficient and productive. They bring leadership, collaboration, and mentoring abilities and are always ready to respond to change. Scrum Masters drive and promote transparency, help teams manage self-organization and coach the team on creating processes for measuring outcomes. They continually work to develop faster and more efficient processes and provide Product Owners with an important helping hand. They help keep an eye on morale and help manage project risks for the team, spotting when resources are not sufficient for objectives. Scrum Masters also have responsibilities that extend beyond any single product to instill agile practices across the organization. 

 It’s often said that the Product Owner should be responsible for product success while the Scrum Master should be responsible for process success. 

Why does a Product Owner need a Scrum Master?

It’s not just that there’s simply too much involved in each role for any one person to handle both at once - at least not sustainably. It’s that their jobs are different, and their objectives are sometimes seemingly at odds. It’s often said that the Product Owner should be responsible for product success while the Scrum Master should be responsible for process success. 

But some overlap in skillsets and responsibility remains intentional and important - a key part of the Scrum Master’s job description is supporting Product Owners. In addition to their responsibilities tuning scrum processes, Scrum Masters assist with the management of the product backlog. After each sprint retrospective, they close the feedback loop with the Product Owner to make sure the next sprint takes into account the improvements that users want. 

Foremost, a Scrum Master serves as a check and balance to the power that the Product Owner holds. By nature of the role, Product Owners center their attention on driving business value, always seeking more team output - they want to get as much work done as possible. A key job of the Scrum Master is to know when to say when. It is in this way that the Product Owner and Scrum Master may seem most like bobsled drivers and brakemen. While a Product Owner strains for speed, a Scrum Master makes sure that work is being delivered in a sustainable manner, without overcommitting the team. Even teams that have successfully over-delivered for multiple consecutive sprints are less likely to continue to stay on course - and they may even crash. 

The necessary tension in discussions between the Product Owner and Scrum Master by definition includes some healthy conflict about resources, expectations and reality. But even if sometimes contentious, these collaborations are ultimately constructive, and drive continuous improvement. Without the push-pull between both Product Owner and Scrum Master, development may not be informed by feedback from every stakeholder audience, which can impede team and product success. 

In all, teams with both a Scrum Master and Product Owner are considerably more likely to set their sights on the right features and user experiences, choose the right agile processes and gather meaningful feedback that leads to continuous improvement. The combination of the two is key to building products that delight customers, deliver business value and cross the finish line first.