Lubo Drobny

Everybody who was part of the SCRUM team could feel this tension between PO and SM. It is hard to avoid it due to essential role definition: PO tries to push into the team more and more features but SM tries to protect the team. Good balance is the key. Too strong PO can destroy SCRUM, team would just hunting features by sacrificing code quality and taking too much shortcuts. Too strong SM can destroy feature productivity because team would be trapped in over-engineering inferno, never-ending re-factoring and slow business value progress. Find the balance.

In 99%, the reason is very simple: Because, you are not doing Scrum,   but probably Kanban, Personal Kanban, Scrum-ban, Scrum-Fall or another aka Scrum-ish style. From my experience usually big corporations tend to implement SCRUM as micro-management tool with never-ending or empty meetings, without any ownership on team side. Usually with huge portion of non-addressable maintenance and legacy code. In this way team is just degraded to bunch of coders who must quickly hack unknown code and all decision are made outside of the team by management. This generates frustration and must fail, soon or later.

Product Owner as visionary & passionate product manager: defines the product road map & vision to deliver at first that 20% of product which repesents 80% of value communicates customer's needs and wishes watches competitors & business creates epics & stories is source of truth for domain knowledge manages budget provides priorities & orders backlog supports fun Scru m Master as natural & strong & servant team leader: moderates scrum meetings evangelizes Agile enforces continues improvement identifies/anticipates impediments & risks and coordinates action items to solve them shields the sprint protects the team from side distractions makes strong alignment between all stakeholders supports team-building empowers the team can accept/reject stories into/from the sprint masters scrum (not project/people) put fun back into computing Team as self-organized & cross-functional & pro-active group: execute the sprint

openness : enables progress trust : enforces internal motivation continues learning & improvement : give satisfaction autonomy : builds responsibility team spirit : allows scaling alignment : creates peace enabling : makes it faster focus : helps to deliver in time fun : makes it easy Release as fast as possible! Do not wait! Fail fast & learn! Experiment! Mistakes are allowed! No politics! No hiding! No denial of the truth! Tell the whole truth, do not serve it step-by step! Manage your manager! Automate! Escalate asap! Use awesome tools! Build skills! Make waves! No fear! No blaming! Do this loop: think, plan, correct plan! Eat own dog food!