Part #9 The role of the Product Manager in Scrum

Scrum has three key roles:
#1 The team – who owns the sprint backlog and are responsible for estimating. functionality and fulfilling the commitment made at sprint planning meetings.

#2 The Product owner – who owns the product backlog and decides on product functionality.
#3 The scrum-master who owns the impediment log and is responsible for removing any blockages that hinder the team from performing and fulfilling their commitments.

So what's the role of the Product Manager in scrum?

Alyssa S. Dver writes in her book: Software product management essentials that: “The job title of Product Manager is vague…. Sometimes the Product Manager is the business owner. Some companies view Product Managers as the liaison between Sales and Engineering, helping to define and refine product requirements and specifications.” Other companies use Product Managers as the scrum-master in addition to being a liaison between the business stakeholders and technical stakeholders.

The software and publishing companies have different stakeholders who are responsible for profit and loss (P/L), user experience etc… If this is the case then the product owner (who sits on the business side of the fence and is responsible for the P/L and/or the user experience) should be the person in charge of defining the product and the Product Manager can facilitate the discussions and decision between the team (technical stakeholders) and the product owners (business stakeholders).

I tend to view the different roles in scrum as an allegory to help me consolidate the lines of demarcation:

#1 The team is the Rock band – people pay to attend concerts to see and listen to the rock band.
#2 The product owner(s) are the fans – who pay to attend concerts, pay for the music and therefore ultimately determine what music is popular and what music the band plays.
#3 The scrum-master is the bouncer cum manager – they protect the band from over enthusiastic fans, make sure that no harm comes to them – book the gigs and makes sure that the band turns up on time.

So if your a Product Manager in a company who is about to implement scrum you need to ask yourself if what you do ultimately determines what music gets played or do you make sure the musicians play the right music. The answer to this question will determine if your the product owner or scrum-master or even perhaps proxy product owner.

See also:

How Agile is your Product Management

What do Product Managers do?

How everyone can get involved in agile

Part #8 Tips on being an Agile Manager

The agile manager must be able to constantly inspect and adapt in order to keep pace with a changing environment and capitalise on the changes as they occur. Here are 6 tips on ways in which you can inspect and adapt in order to improve the agility of your management and/or Product Management.

Inspecting:
#1 Agile managers tend to have an understanding of what is coming up – this occurs either by information that is cascaded to them from the board or Chief Executives or by anticipating future directions of the company and/or the market place.

#2 Agile managers seek to know the 'strengths' and 'areas that need improving, (weakness) of their team and the teams they work with - whether it's a virtual team (if they are matrix managers - as in the typical agile Product Management role) or those who directly report to them.

#3 Agile mangers strive to be better thinkers: they have the capacity to hold two opposing ideas in their head at once and then be able, creatively, to resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that has elements of the others but are superior to both.

Adapting:
#4 Agile managers are adaptive managers, they put people before ideas – they value people and ensure that they are placed in the best position for them to succeed.

#5 Agile managers adapt themselves and their programme to ensure that they remove the obstacles that are either slowing down their team’s performance or preventing them from achieving company goals.

#6 Agile managers find out what their teams expect of them and they ensure that their teams know what is expected of them – they then seek to remove any areas of potential conflict between the two in order to ensure that there are no areas of ambiguity.

The world, the markets we operate in, the companies we work for are constantly changing – the agile manager must constantly adapt themselves and their teams to ensure that they continue to function successfully in the constant changing and turbulent environment.