Can Product Owner also be the Scrum Master?

One of the most common points of stress in a scrum project is when the same individual gets assigned more than one role in a scrum team. As you may have seen in the article titled “Participants in Scrum” each role has its own responsibilities and often times the roles clash with one another. In this article am gonna highlight why I think the roles of a scrum master and product owner should not be held by the same individual.

Reason 1: Different Purpose

The two roles couldn’t be any more different than they are now. They are both focused on different aspects of the project. The product owner spends his time thinking about what the next product increment should be and how to liaise with key business stakeholders to understand their needs. The scrum master on the other hand is thinking about how to motivate & help the team to deliver the last increment that the product owner requested and how he can remove the impediments in the teams way.

If you are from a software/IT background, I could add an analogy here between a developer and a tester. Even though a developer can do testing and a tester can do coding, there is a reason these two roles were separated. When we test our own code, a sense of confidence creeps in which hinders the testing effectiveness. Whereas, when we are testing someone else’s code, our instinctive sense of doubt prevails and we are able to find much more bugs on the code.

Get the picture?

Reason 2:  There is always conflict between the two roles

As scrum master, one of my regular activities was negotiating with the product owner whenever he/she feels the team is just not taking the new story they created mid-sprint or one of the good to have stories for the upcoming sprint. The role of the product owner is to ask for more and more stories to be included in the sprint while the scrum master tries to protect the team and make sure that they don’t overcommit themselves while they continue to deliver good quality software sprint after sprint.

This means, these two roles are going to be at cross-hairs frequently and keeping the two roles separate means either party can do justice to their respective roles.

Reason 3: They are probably busy with their individual roles already and adding another role will overburden them

Even though the roles of a scrum master and product owner may sound simple on paper, trust me, it is a lot of work and both of those parties (in a typical scrum project) are probably quite busy doing their respective tasks and adding another role would overburden them. Even if they manage to burn the midnight oil and try to do multi-tasking, it will definitely affect their productivity & efficiency

Reason 4: Team and/or Product suffers

The scrum master is the guardian or protector for the team and is always protecting them from unwanted noise & distractions. A scrum master who is also the product owner might be biased toward adding more & more scope items to the product/sprint backlog and in the absence of a dedicated guardian the team will be exposed to a massive backlog which they will be constantly overloaded with. This will result in reduced velocity (with multiple WIP stories that get spill-over to the next sprint), reduced quality and more importantly reduced team morale.

On the other hand if the individual is more scrum master and pushes back on all new requirements, the product backlog and the organizations product as a whole will suffer while the team will be quite happy and satisfied.

A good scrum project is one where we are able to balance between keeping either demands at appropriate levels and not let one side overpower the other.

Note: It is practically impossible for the same individual to do 100% justice to both roles simultaneously. Bias and impact on the team or product is inevitable.

What are your thoughts on the same individual being both scrum master and product owner? Sound off in the comments section…

Can the Product Owner also be the Scrum Master?

In one of our earlier articles about the key scrum participants, we had talked about both the Scrum Master Role and the Product Owner Role. In organisations that want to adopt Scrum, one of the common mistakes they do is to club the role of Scrum Master and Product Owner. We multi-task all the time and it shouldn't be a big deal for a guy to take up both of those roles, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, its not as easy as it sounds. If there are two roles in a Scrum Project that cannot be combined or assigned to the same individual, its these two roles. in this article you will learn why….

Different Purpose

The role or purpose of a Scrum Master and that of a Product Owner couldn't be more different. The Product Owner thinks about what features product should have and is always going to be pushing for more to be done or delivered by the team. The Scrum Master on the other hand is going to try to protect the team from external distractions and make sure the team performs to the best of their abilities to deliver a good quality product.

This means that, the roles of the Scrum Master and Product Owner are going to be butting heads constantly. Like I just mentioned, the job of the Product Owner is to keep pushing for more and more features to be added to the Iteration Backlog whereas the Scrum Master is going to keep pushing back to make sure the team isn’t overloaded.

Even though the product owner does not want the project to fail, their natural tendency is to want more and more features. Without a Scrum Master shielding the team from this pressure, the scrum team is going to have a real tough time handling the product owners ever increasing needs.

If you are still not convinced these roles should be assigned to two different people, think about this – every software project team has both Developers and Testers. Yes, a good developer can test and a good tester can probably do coding but, it always makes sense to split these 2 roles.

Why?

Because the Developer aims at building more features and may overlook some aspects of his code that may have bugs. Having a different person do the testing means that more bugs are identified and a better quality product is delivered. Similar rationale can be applied here. If the role of the Scrum Master is played by the Product Owner, the Scrum Team will suffer and eventually the deliverables & their quality will suffer too.

So, it's a good idea to keep these 2 roles separated…

Some Last Words:

In real life, even though everyone agrees that these two roles should not be combined, very small organizations may not have the money to hire a separate product owner and scrum master. They may Improvise by clubbing this role but believe me, this is not a good idea.

It would be better to actually hire a part term scrum master or hire a scrum master to be shared by two small scrum teams instead of combining these roles.

Do you think that an individual playing both these roles can do justice to either role without compromising the team? Have you seen projects succeed or fail because the same person played both roles? Do sound off in the comments section.