So the product owner must take all these inputs and prioritize the work. The product owner also balances the needs of other stakeholders in the organization.

The product owner should not only understand the customer but also have a vision for the value the scrum team is delivering to the customer. Trust between these two roles is crucial. The business is represented by the product owner who tells the development what is important to deliver. Since agile teams are, by design, flexible and responsive, it is the responsibility of the product owner to ensure that they are delivering the most value. Scrum product owners understand the customer and business requirements, then create and manage the product backlog based on those requirements. To provide some structure to this complex, ever-changing, and often annoying world, scrum gives a lightweight structure with the three scrum roles of development team member, product owner, and scrum master. Teams might not know the skills or amount of work needed up front, and need the flexibility to change course once they know more.

As the old saying goes ‘you don’t know what you don’t know, until you know you don’t know it’. This gets even harder the more complex the problem a team is trying to solve. Because the problems are different, the team structures and skills needed are also different. They would include a graphic designer, sound engineer, and graphics developer. If, on the other hand, the team is working on the next generation of Donkey Kong, the skills needed would be very different. For example, if the team is working on a web insurance application, they will need people who know the technology, the back-end systems, and the business domain. What it doesn’t do is provide a one-size-fits-all model for teams to work within.

It provides the basic structure for regular meetings, artifacts, and who does what. Scrum is a framework for teams to build their processes on top of.

Team scribe definition