An organisation names three product managers as "the Product Owner group" for one product. They meet fortnightly and settle the Product Backlog order by majority vote, then send the agreed order to the Scrum Team. What is wrong with this arrangement in Scrum terms?
Professional Scrum Master I, objective 3. Managing products with agility medium
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The options
Not correct Nothing, as long as the three of them share one Product Backlog and one Product Goal
Wrong. One backlog and one Goal are necessary but not sufficient — the arrangement still leaves no single person who can be asked why an item sits where it does.
Not correct Nothing, provided the Developers can ask any of the three for a decision within a Sprint
Wrong, and it is the practical-sounding fix teams try. Responsiveness is not the issue; three people entitled to answer the same question can give three answers, and the Developers cannot tell which one binds.
Correct The Product Owner is one person, not a committee — the three may represent the needs of many stakeholders, but one of them has to hold the accountability
Correct. The Guide is unusually blunt here, and the reason is decidability: a committee can deadlock or trade favours, while one person can be asked and can be held to the answer.
Not correct The problem is the fortnightly cadence, since the order must be revisited every Sprint Planning
Wrong. Nothing requires the order to be reviewed on a fixed cadence — the backlog is adjusted whenever more is learned, and the cadence is not what breaks this arrangement.
Why
A committee of Product Owners fails in a specific way: it makes the ordering unattributable, so the team cannot get a fast decision and the organisation cannot see whose view of value it is looking at. Scrum's answer is not that other voices are unwelcome — the Product Owner may represent the needs of many stakeholders — but that the representing is done by one person who then answers for the result.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Scrum Guide section Product Owner
- What it says
- The Product Owner is one person, not a committee.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 3 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise Professional Scrum Master I
More questions on this objective
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