The role of Product Owner (PO) is critical for the success of
any Scrum team. PO is the voice of the customer and responsible for schedule, scope
and cost. PO is a bridge between the business and the Dev Team. PO is the one
who ensures that optimum business value is achieved. PO maintains the Product Backlog
and prioritizes the items in it. PO also
ensures that crisp requirements are provided to the Dev team so that they can create
quality product. PO is mandated to attend Sprint Planning and Review meeting.
But that leads to an interesting question of whether or not PO attends Daily
Scrum as well.
The main purpose of Daily Scrum meeting is to update fellow
team members on the daily progress and report any issues/show-stoppers. Scrum
Master takes a note of the issues and blockers and tries to resolve them after
this meeting.
PO can attend this meeting on need basis and is not mandatory
to attend. Even if PO is attending the meeting (S)He should be in a read-only
mode and must not interfere. PO should avoid going into providing any
clarifications and getting into discussion with the Dev team during this
meeting. Following are some of the risks which might arise if PO starts
attending Daily Scrum on regular basis and also interferes in between:
- This might lead to PO micro managing the team which
will be counter productive
- PO starts acting as PM and we go back in traditional
Project management mode
- PO and Scrum Master takes total control of the team
sidelining the team in one corner
- Daily Scrum meetings over shoot stipulated time of 15
mins making it irrelevant to most of the attendees especially the Dev team
- Adds a lot of waste as this meeting is held on daily
basis
Overall, PO can attend Daily Scrum probably towards the start
of the project while whole team is trying to ramp up the knowledge about the
project and its domain. But once the team is mature enough that they have
sufficient knowledge about the processes then it is a good idea not to attend
this meeting regularly.
- Aman (http://reaspro.com)