Great Scrums Need Great Product Owners: Unbounded Collaboration and Collective Product Ownership

Scrum describes a separation of roles; the productowner is accountable for achieving business objectivesand the team for technical execution. A pragmatic andcollegial relationship between a product owner and teamcan satisfy the definition of collaboration and honor roleswhile barely tapping or actually working against thepotential of a project and its participants. This papersurveys literature to describe different forms ofcollaboration, to establish that deep, unboundedcollaboration is at the heart of agile values, and thatpartnerships of high trust and shared risk lead to valueand innovation. Finally, this paper incorporates a real- world example of a product owner who, while remainingaccountable to the outcome, shared ownership overvision, priorities and execution with her Scrum/XPdevelopment team.