Fixing Your Scrum

The Proxy Product Owner

When your company adopts Scrum, upper management may think about the product owner role like this:

The product owner manages the product backlog. That sounds like something a business analyst should do, right? Sure, it comes with a little more responsibility, but people in the organization might freak out if we adopt the term “product owner.” We can make product backlog management the person’s sole purpose, and other duties such as managing the budget will remain the way we do them now. If we give up control of the money, what happens to our job?

Let’s repurpose the project manager or business analyst role and call this new role the “product backlog manager.” We’ll outline our higher-level initiatives, have weekly status ...