Why is there no Project Manager in a Scrum team?

Let’s start with a quick look at the project manager role –

Traditionally, the project manager’s role was to create and then execute “The plan” within the approved budget, time, and scope.

The project managers had to deal with varied and wide-ranging responsibilities, including — managing scope, cost, risk, quality, people, process, communication, procurement, etc.

Yeah! That did put the project manager in a very tight and challenging spot.

Now, a quick rundown of roles (accountabilities) in Scrum –

A Scrum team has only three accountabilities: the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the Developers.

A product owner is a single person representing the project’s business side and accountable for maximizing the value of the product built by the team.

The product owner focuses on building the right product at the right time by balancing competing priorities.

The Scrum Master is a servant leader helping everyone in the organization, including the Scrum team, understand and implement the Scrum theory and practices.

The Scrum master provides their service to the team, the product owner, and the organization by embodying agility, removing impediments to progress, facilitating events as needed or requested, and triggering change that helps to improve quality or productivity.

The developers determine how to achieve the goals established by the product owner in the most effective way by creating an aspect of usable increment each sprint.

So in effect –

The product owner strives to maximize the R.O.I by taking responsibility for the scope and schedule trade-off.

The Scrum master is the subject matter expert in the process framework and uses Scrum to support the team to perform to their highest level of performance.

Developers take on many delivery responsibilities like day-to-day project decisions and task assignments.

The Scrum team shares the responsibilities of quality and risk management.

In a nutshell, Scrum effectively divides project management responsibilities among the product owner, Scrum master, and developers.

Thus, we don’t see Project Managers in Scrum.

In a product development that needs multiple Scrum teams, though the teams will still do much of the project management, there will be additional coordination required that might call for a few more roles.