An Investigation Into Product Owner Practices in Scrum Implementations

Introduction

Software development during the 1990s experienced a fundamental shift in respect to the planning and management techniques. With accusations such as the Chaos Report, the field of IT project management was under attack and innovative approaches were emerging from industry (Mulder, 1994). One of the main instigations causing new development approaches was the requirement of substantial upfront planning and the inability of traditional methods to handle frequent changes. In 2001, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born (Beck et al., 2001) after several thought leaders gathered to discuss better ways of building software to meet the demands of a more globally connected digital economy. By the early 2000s, several agile software development (ASD) methods were created, including eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-driven Development, and Pragmatic Programming.

Scrum, the most widely used agile approach (Version One, 2018; West, Grant, Gerush, & D's ilva, 2010), has been instituted in many organizations and deeply studied by academicians (Rising and Janoff, 2000; Smits and Pshigoda, 2007; Bannerman and Hossain, 2012; Khmelevsky, Li, and Madnick, 2017). Past studies have examined an array of Scrum-related topics such as how Scrum works in local and distributed development environments, organizational transitions from individual to self-managing teams, inter-team coordination dynamics, perceptions of sustainability, Scrum adaptations in practice and the classroom, and the overall impact of Scrum practices on project outcomes (Rising and Janoff, 2000; Sutherland et al., 2007; Moe et al., 2010; Overhage and Schlauderer, 2012; Paasivaara et al., 2012; Hron et al., 2018; Masood et al., 2018). The Scrum framework consists of roles, artifacts, and events that guide teams in developing products for customer needs (Scrum Alliance, 2020). One central aspect of Scrum that is said to be critical for producing targeted outcomes is working in close collaboration with the customer or customer representative (i.e., Product Owner). However, despite the attention that Scrum has received from researchers, the Product Owner role that represents customer needs has received much less attention. While the extant literature describes the responsibilities and ideal skillset of a Product Owner (Cohn, 2010; Sutherland & Schwaber, 2016), many organizations struggle with determining who should assume the Product Owner role and integrating Product Owner practices in existing work practices, as these organizations don't know how to relate this new role to existing roles in the organization (Oomen et al., 2017). Recent studies suggest a gap between the activities performed by Product Owners in industry and those commonly found in the agile literature (Sverrisdottir et al., 2014; Bass et al., 2018). Of the dearth of studies that examine the Product Owner role, most focus on the expectations of the Product Owner role from the team's point of view (Unger-Windeler Schneider, 2019), such that few studies provide a perspective from actual Product Owners (exceptions include Schlauder and Overhage, 2013; Sverrisdottir et al., 2014; Matturro et al., 2018). Given that the Product Owner is said to maximize the value of the product (Deemer et al., 2012; Sutherland & Schwaber, 2016), understanding the role and the impact of its practices on outcomes yields helpful insights to both research and practice. While there are countless studies focusing upon the role of the IT staff in projects, we suggest that the literature surrounding the Scrum framework and project success is naïve in that much less research has been given to the Product Owner role or the perspective of Product Owners (Schlauder and Overhage, 2013). The objective of this chapter is to examine the nature of Product Owner practices and their impact on (the Product Owner's) perceptions of project success. In the next section, we provide a brief overview of Scrum, the Product Owner role.