Do Scrum Masters Train Product Owners or is it the Other Way Around?

Let’s face it, some of the baggage we have from how we’ve worked in the past tends to follow us. Which is why I have found that teams who have worked in more traditional settings, always feel that there needs to be some kind of hierarchy in a team environment.

In any environment, regardless of whether you are working in Agile or working in a more traditional project management setting, there will always be someone that needs to be the boss. And this is a conversation that I have in every training because sometimes people misunderstand flexible working for meaning lack of authority or structure. 

So yes, even in a Scrum Team there needs to be decisive decision-making, taken by the team or the product owner, that leads to product development success. Scrum encourages decentralized decision-making, and as such, there is a high degree of accountability and responsibility across the team.

We all know that the Product Owner and Scrum Master participate in some of the most important decisions in product development – but who really trains who? My answer to this question is both, and this is because they have mutually grown alongside together throughout the entire process of Scrum, and have learned from each other through the principles of Inspection, Transparency and Adaptation. 

A Scrum Master is not a junior position; they should have some understanding and experience of product ownership and should be dedicated to spending as much time as possible towards learning about product ownership, and how they can better support each other.

Another part of taking accountability and responsibility as a Scrum Master is to teach and mentor the rest of your team, especially if they do not have a good enough understanding of the key components of Scrum. A good leader inspires, educates and facilitates a team on where they should go. 

When it comes down to the Product Owners I have worked with whilst being a Scrum Master, I was often positioned in environments where I was not a domain expert and didn’t know some of the areas of Product Ownership. This meant that I needed to ask for help from Product Owners.

It involved understanding: 
🚀 What the Product is. 

🚀 How to help the Scrum get to where they want to go. 

🚀 Adopt an approach that facilitates mutual understanding and humility. 

When I worked closely with the Product Owner and Scrum Team to gain a better understanding of these points, I realised that we were both experts in different things and that this was actually a strength. So instead of focusing on the negatives of how we were different and what we were lacking in comparison, I looked at the positives, and strived to grow together rather than in isolation. 

The benefits of this are: 
🚀 Enhanced collaboration. 

🚀 Greater team satisfaction. 

🚀 Increased productivity. 

🚀 Reduced conflict and errors. 

Do you want to learn more about how to harness an effective relationship between the Product Owner and Scrum Master? 

Get in touch today and let’s work together on your journey to success! 

Pragmatic Shift is a Scrum Training, Agile Consulting, and Agile Coaching consultancy that specialises in delivering Scrum.Org certified scrum courses, and helping organisations increase their business agility and product development success through agile consulting and coaching.

We firmly believe that a shift to agile is a pragmatic shift. A natural evolution from traditional project management and product management. A proven, reliable, and resilient framework for addressing compelling problems and developing complex solutions.

Over a decade’s worth of experience as an agile practitioner, agile consultant, agile coach, and scrum trainer informs our pragmatic approach to change. Agile dogma has no value in the context of product development or organisational change.

Instead, we look to start where you are, work with what you have, and make meaningful interventions that align with the objectives you are trying to achieve.

Progress over perfection.

If this sounds like a pragmatic solution to you, visit the following pages for more information.

Scrum Training: https://pragmaticshift.com/training/
Agile Consulting: Coming Soon!
Agile Coaching: https://www.thescrumcoach.uk

#scrum #scrumtraining #agilescrumtraining #scrumorg #scrumcourses #scrumcertification #agile #agilecoach #agileconsultant #agilecoaching #agileconsulting #agiletransformation #agileadoption #scrumcoach #scrumworkshop #scrumskills #scrumtips #scrummaster #productowner #agileleader #scrumdeveloper #developer #projectmanagement #agileprojectmanagement #productdevelopment #agileproductdevelopment #productowner #scrummaster