The importance of the Product Owner

It is probably true that the Product Owner is yet more important than the ScrumMaster for the success of the team. The ScrumMaster should, almost by himself, triple the velocity of the team. He or she is the ingredient without which it does not happen.

And the Product Owner can execute the 85-33 Rule — where the $1 million of annual cost to $3 million of annual NPV moves up to getting $9 million of NPV for the same cost. (I will discuss the 85-33 rule again soon.) Ah, yes, another tripling, independent of the tripling of velocity.

(What if both things tripled? Would anyone at your firm notice? Not likely, since few firms have BV metrics that could be linked back to a team.)

Suffice to say that the Product Owner is very, very important for the customer and for the team. Even for the firm and its shareholders.

We also think Business Value Engineering is very, very important (discussed in earlier blog posts).

So, we are very happy to have two Certified Scrum Product Owner courses coming up. To us, the CSPO courses should be at least as popular as the CSM courses. They are certainly as much needed.

We would be interested in your story about the value of a better Product Owner.

 

 

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