Why should a Product Manager care about: the Scrum Guide?
“I’m a Product Manager why should I care about the Scrum Guide? Well, most Product Managers are in charge of managing the success of complex product development. Complex development processes benefit from an empirical approach and the Scrum Guide is a handy reference to a framework that can help you with that!
“Hang on. Scrum has a Product Owner, that is something completely different! I’m a Product MANAGER”. Well congratulations! Product Management is the profession, Product Ownership merely describes the interactions with the Scrum Team and the organisation. So, knowing what the Product Owner role entails is very useful for Product Managers.
“A Product Owner is a Product Manager with a Scrum Team”
The Scrum Guide is a reference guide, a tool, a set of basic rules that help you to establish a framework that you can work with, expand, explore so you can be more successful as a Product Manager.
So what is your role?
“The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.“
— Scrum Guide
Not bad, so you are the one that “owns” the product. Not manage the store on someone else’s behalf. It’s not a 9 till 5 job, but closer to an entrepreneur that is constantly seeking to expand and maximise the return on investment.
In modern day this employs typically many techniques from classical Product Management such as contextual inquiry, Lean UX and data science. Using whatever techniques you see fit the Product Manager creates a list of things and activities you think maximise this value. The only thing the Scrum asks of the Product Owner is to order this list, so we know what is the most important.
The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. […] The Product Owner may do the work, or have the Development Team do it. However, the Product Owner remains accountable.
— Scrum Guide
Here is another clue in the Scrum Guide that helps us unravel many of the myths of the Product Owner vs Product Manager debate. You must make sure that there is a strategic plan, a road map or as it is called in the Scrum Guide: a Product Backlog. You don’t need to add all the detail yourself, but if it is not there you must step in.
“For the Product Owner to succeed, the entire organization must respect his or her decisions. The Product Owner’s decisions are visible in the content and ordering of the Product Backlog. No one can force the Development Team to work from a different set of requirements.”
— Scrum Guide
This emphasis is actually a logical extension from the first statement: if the Product Owner is responsible for maximising the value, he should also have the authority that comes with it.
In my opinion this is where Scrum differs the most from what I learned as a Product Manager. Scrum actually bestows the power on the role of the Product Owner, whereas a Product Manager I stuggled though lack of that power.
“But that is not how things are done in our company!” Yes, I know and that is the cause why so many “agile transformations” have yielded so little results in terms of new business value. When you read the Scrum Guide you will find it holds very little that doesn’t make sense and at the same time it doesn’t tell you how to do it. This means there is a wide range of tools and techniques that you can use to implement the Product Owner role as a Product Manager. It also means that :
“the Scrum Guide is not an instruction manual for Product Management, but rather the scaffolding which you can use to build your own process.”
— The Product Samurai
My advice is to read through it. Examine what you do today, and explore if it something the Scrum Guide actually asks you to or is a practice you have added. (E.g. making a forecast is not the same as planning poker)
Oh and the official source is of course: here.
This blog is part of a mini-series called: “Why should a Product Manager care about?”.
