Meet the Scrum Product Owner

You are responsible for developing a new product or carrying out some other complex business project. Traditionally, you would have entrusted the project supervision to an experienced project leader, with the expectation to get on the target date a useful and high-quality piece of software.

However, you have some concerns given the high failure rate of IT projects. And even if the project is completed on time, you are aware that your business needs may well have evolved by the delivery date. Therefore, it is possible you will find yourself—like the rest of the industry—with a product for which 65% of the functionalities are of little use or no use at all.

The high failure rate of software development projects is often attributed to the lack of involvement of business field experts. Initial over-specification, numerous change requests, and a final software interface that does not meet user needs are the symptoms of a lack of cooperation between the development team and the business experts.

Scrum provides you with an alternative to directly and effectively manage product development. Intuitive and hardly intrusive at all, the Scrum process offers you production quality product increments at frequent and regular intervals, generally in less than a month.