Product Management: Foundations to Practice · Agile Product Development
Working with Scrum as a Product Manager
Scrum was designed to protect a delivery team's focus, sometimes at direct odds with a PM's instinct to react quickly to new information. This chapter covers how to work within that tension productively.
In organizations using Scrum, the product owner role, as defined by the 2020 Scrum Guide, owns the product backlog and is responsible for maximizing the value delivered by the development team, working closely with a product manager who may hold that role or work alongside whoever does [25]. This includes ordering the backlog to maximize value, ensuring the backlog is transparent and understood by the team, and being available to clarify requirements throughout the sprint.
- The product owner role formally owns backlog ordering, transparency, and availability to clarify requirements during the sprint.
- Backlog refinement is easy to under-invest in, but a poorly refined backlog slows sprint planning and causes mid-sprint surprises.
- Scrum locks sprint scope once planning is complete specifically to protect the delivery team's focus and estimating reliability.
- Scrum organizes delivery execution; it is not a discovery framework for deciding what to build in the first place.