This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Working with the Team
As mentioned earlier, the product owner is a member of the Scrum team and relies on collaboration with the ScrumMaster and team. The team itself is self-organizing, cross-functional, and small. It should include all roles required to bring the product to life. All members of the Scrum team must form a close and trusting relationship, a symbiosis, and work together as peers. There must be no us and them. There can only be us.
To allow the Scrum team to flourish, minimize any changes to it within and across releases. It takes some time for a group of individuals to become a true team—a tightly knit unit with members who trust and support each other and who work together effectively. Changing the team's composition makes the team-building process start all over again, and as a result, productivity and self-organization suffer. Additionally, establish a long-term partnership between a Scrum team and its product; every product should be developed by one or more dedicated teams. This not only facilitates learning, but it simplifies the allocation of people and resources.
Since the product owner, ScrumMaster, and team need to closely collaborate on an ongoing basis, it is desirable to colocate all Scrum team members. Take the example of mobile.de. Colocating the product owners with the ScrumMaster and team increased productivity and morale.3 If the product owner cannot be permanently colocated with the team, have as many face-to-face meetings as possible. Remote product owners can benefit from partial colocation, working on-site with the team for several days in each sprint. For product owners working on the same site but not yet colocated with their teams, I often suggest the one-hour rule: Product owners should spend at least one hour per day with their teams in the team room.
The team room should be conducive to creative and collaborative work. It should be an environment that facilitates communication and interaction, makes work enjoyable, and allows displaying key artifacts as information radiators (the vision statement, high-priority product backlog items, a software architecture diagram, the sprint backlog, and the release and sprint burndown). The best team rooms balance teamwork with the need for privacy and working in small groups by providing breakout rooms.