How Product Owners And Scrum Masters Are Related To Each Other?
The product owner and Scrum Master are eminent roles that come to mind, whenever we mention scrum teams. Both roles are requisite in the scrum team. They serve each other and the development team.
Role of Product Owner
The product owner is an individual that tells the development team what is important to deliver. Product managers are supposed to make the most of the product value by prioritizing items on backlogs. Facilitating transparent communication between stakeholders and the development team is a crucial task of the product owner. Transparency helps a cross-functional team to work smoothly.
Role of Scrum Master
Scrum Masters are leaders and mentors of the agile team. They make sure that the agile philosophy is followed by other team members. The Scrum Master eliminates the errors or difficulties that the development team might face and encourages the team to work effectively and efficiently. The Scrum Master should uplift team members and encourage them to work to the best of their ability. Scrum Master plays a big role in improving the performance of the development team.
How Scrum Master Serves Product Owner
As a leader, there are several services that a Scrum Master should provide to the product owner and the development team. Below are the services that should be provided by the Scrum Master to the product owner.
- Making sure that everyone in the scrum team is aware of the product which they are working on. Goals, scope, and product domain should be discussed thoroughly with the team.
- Uncover approaches for efficacious product backlog management.
- Ensuring that every individual in the team understands the need for concise and clear product backlog items.
- Uplifting product planning in an empirical environment.
- Understanding agility and making sure everyone in the team practices it.
- Arranging scrum events according to need.
Let’s understand the above points thoroughly.
- Ensuring That Everyone In The Team Understands The Product Goals:
Oft-times there may be a difference between the perspective of the product owner and the development team. Filling that gap of vision is the responsibility of the Scrum Master.
- Efficacious Backlog Management:
A product owner is in charge of creating and managing the product backlog. One of the major services that a Scrum Master provides the product owner is helping the product owner in keeping backlog management up-to-date and groomed.
- Helping The Agile Team To Get A Clear Vision Of Product Backlog:
Filling the gap of vision between the scrum team and product owner is a vital service that the Scrum Master provides. Also, building trust between the development team and product owner is a Scrum Master’s task.
- Maintaining An Empirical Environment In Product Planning
Experiments and experience are the two pillars of the empirical environment. An ideal Scrum Master should take experience from their past experiments and lead the product owner and development team in planning and developing.
- Ensuring Product Owner’s Work
To maximize the value of the product backlog, the Scrum Master helps the product owner. Though maximizing the value of product backlog is the product owner’s job, Scrum Master assists product owners in grooming and updating backlogs. Approaches like MoSCow ( Must have, Should have, Could have,Will not have) are used in updating backlogs. The majority of Scrum Masters know about these techniques and they can assist product owners with that.
- Handling Scrum Events
Scrum events are significant practice in scrum agile teams. Scrum events such as stand-ups, retrospectives, etc are arranged by the Scrum Master. Stand-ups are a great way to address issues in a team or raise issues regarding a product.
- Encouraging Scrum And Agility Practice
Maintaining scrum practices in the workplace is a key role of Scrum Masters. Scrum Masters should ensure that everyone in the team should be aware of scrum techniques and scrum value. This is a major service that a Scrum Master provides to a product owner, as the scrum concept helps the team acknowledge the changing requirements of the product.
Scrum Master Salient Services To The Development Team
The Scrum Master helps the development team in various ways such as:
- Educating the development team about self-management and cross-functionality.
- Assisting the development team in creating high-value products.
- Eliminating errors
Now let’s understand, above points thoroughly:
1.Educating The Team
Self-organized and Cross-functional is a resulting goal of any agile team. The Scrum Master helps the development team in attaining a high level of cross-functionality. Being self-organized means being less dependent on outside forces and achieving tasks without waiting for any managerial approvals. The Scrum Master has to uplift the development team to become more self-managed. This will make them more responsible and productive as they are accountable for their actions. Also Scrum Master encourages cross-functionality as it increases the productivity of work.
2. Assisting Team In Creating A High End Product
The secret to high-value products is customer feedback. A scrum leader should be open-minded and should be open to any type of feedback. Implementing customers feedback will eventually improve product quality and performance.
3. Eliminating Errors
As a scrum leader, the foremost responsibility is to assist the development team to perform. Eliminating unnecessary errors from the development team’s progress will help them to focus more on the product. Scrum Master constantly works on creating a distraction-free environment for the development team.
Conclusion
Every project comes with its fair share of problems, but agile and scrum framework considerably alleviate risk and problems and bring value to products. With a Scrum Master in a scrum team, many problems and issues hindering the progress of the team get eliminated.
