Among other points brought up by Barbara Nelson at the OC APLN meeting last week, she contends that Product Owner is the most stressful role in Scrum, and I don’t doubt that.  I’m sure it’s especially true in organizations that haven’t yet wizened up to the fact that product marketing takes a triad of full-time roles (a Product Strategist, a Technical Product Manager, and a Product Marketing Manager aka. Go-To-Market Manager).  Not only do some organizations try to cram all three roles into a single position, but they often pile on the tasks of a Sales Engineer to boot.

Then, comes along Scrum (or some other form of Agile) and the whole Technical Product Manager role gets turned upside down to become what Scrum calls a Product Owner. About the only good news here is that Mike Cohn shows in his book, Succeeding with Agile, that the time required of a Product Owner while an organization is adopting Agile is not too intense right at the start.  New Scrum development teams place much higher demands on the ScrumMaster than the Product Owner at first, before the ratio flip-flops.  So, there’s a little leeway for the product management organization to figure out how to accommodate Scrum in their day-to-day activities while the development teams are still getting up to speed on Scrum.  That leeway is a small gift that shouldn’t be squandered.

For more about the triad of product marketing roles, be sure to grab Pragmatic Marketing’s free e-book, The Strategic Role of Product Management.