Agile Scrum – Should a Scrum Team Member or Scrum Master Be Appointed as Product Owner?

agilescrumwaterfall

Lately we had a project, in which client was busy touring. As usual scrum team was formed, management decided to appoint our analyst as Product owner since Client won’t be able to participate actively. Analyst was the one who worked closely with client for requirement analysis and specification drafting.

Client doesn’t have the time to review first two releases. Everything went smoothly until, client saw third release; he wasn’t satisfied with some functionalities, and those was introduced by make shift Product Owner (our analyst).

We were told to wait till design team finished mock-up of all pages and client checked each one and approved to continue working. Scrum team is there, but no sprints – we finished work almost like classic waterfall method.

Is it a good idea to appoint scrum team member or master as product owner? Do we need to follow scrum in the absence of client/product owner participation?

Best Answer

It was only a few weeks ago that Mike Cohn wrote about combining scrum master and product owner roles on his blog. I don't think I can put it any better than he did, but my short summary of his post is this:

  • it's a bad idea
  • SM and PO perform very different kinds of tasks ("star tasks" and "guardian tasks" in Cohn's words)
  • the person combining the two roles is unlikely to be a good fit for all tasks involved in both roles
  • the team may be hurt by the combined SM/PO neglecting the tasks they are not the best at.

I think there is nothing wrong per se with taking any member of a scrum team and moving him/her to Product Owner. But you have to realize that it's like a promotion or an internal transfer; it creates a hole in the team and the hole needs to be filled. Maybe the team can "self-reorganize" to fill the hole; maybe it needs to hire a new employee to fill the vacant position.