The Product Owner Cycle: Coordinating the “What”

Scaling the Product Owner – The Product Owner Cycle

For each Scrum of Scrums, there is a shared common backlog that feeds the network of teams. It requires a Product Owner Team (PO Team), including a Chief Product Owner, who is the final authority on the ordering of it. The PO Team’s main focus is ensuring that the individual teams’ priorities follow along a single path. This allows them to coordinate their individual team’s backlogs and build alignment with stakeholders and customer needs.

Each team’s Product Owner is accountable for the composition and prioritization of their team’s Sprint backlog and may pull items from the common backlog or generate independent backlog items at their discretion as needed to meet business objectives.

The main functions of the Product Owner Team are to:

• communicate the overarching vision for the product & make it visible to everyone in the organization

• build alignment with key stakeholders to secure support for backlog implementation

• generate a single, prioritized backlog; ensuring that duplication of work is avoided

• work with the Scrum of Scrums Master to create a minimally uniform “Definition of Done” that applies to all team

• eliminate dependencies raised by the teams

• generate a coordinated Roadmap and Release Plan

• monitor metrics that give insight into the product and the market