Can I have more than one role in the SCRUM process?

Question

Do you think there can be more than one role for a company in a software company that wants to use SCRUM?

eg. is it normal / possible if a person

• Master and member of the SCRUM team
• Product Owner and Team Member
• Master and owner of SCRUM

What combinations do you think are possible? Do you work in such a team? What should be considered if a person has several roles?

Thanks for any tips.

Answer 1

Thanks for all your answers. I cannot choose one of them as accepted answers, because all of them are valuable. Therefore, I accept this answer to remove the reminder from my profile page.

Answer 2

All of our scrum masters participate in the team, and I think it works fine. This process handles performance differences very well.

I really believe that the product owner should be external, but I just think that the teams should have some distance from the product owner.

Answer 3

The owner of the product should not be the role of the developer or project; the thing is to have someone who can accept the result and who is an expert on the subject. If you make them team members, you will return to having the product developers define the product; this is a bad thing. And if you make them a SCRUM master, firstly, they probably don’t have a development background for which the SCRUM master should understand the problems and assessment, and secondly, they then control the exact processes and products that the SCRUM master should perform as a balance .

The SCRUM master can certainly take on some of the responsibilities of a team member, especially in a small team. However, in most cases when the team size exceeds 3-4, the SCRUM master will not have enough time to develop regualr.

[Updated: The SCUM wizard is very inconvenient.]

Answer 4

Find scrumdiscussion list archives. This was discussed in detail in the past there.

Answer 5

Our master and owner of the SCRUM product is the same person, but he is a unique person who knew when he wears his workshop hat SCRUM (or in the case of the Kid carbine in this case), he does not own the product and vice versa.

Oh yes, and I definitely recommend the Karate Kid screensaver for the SCRUM wizard.

Answer 6

In an “ideal Scrum situation” you will not share roles.

Scrum master and team member
Sometimes a conflict of interest may arise between them, which must fulfill its task and must remove the obstacle that a team member has reported. In each of their roles, they “commit” to fulfill their role until the end of the sprint - what should take precedence? However, this is actually probably the most common combination of roles.

Product owner and team member
You really should never have the same person who would agree to work for both full and final work and actually do the work. This should happen only in the company of one person, and in this case, you may question the idea of ​​using Scrum in the first place

Scrum master and product owner
Again, I see a potential conflict of interest between the Scrum master who wants to complete the sprint as it was done, and product owners must agree with the statement that the sprint was accepted.

Answer 7

Scrum deliberately shares traditional project management responsibilities to protect against traditional project management errors, including pressure and micro-management. By definition, Scrum Master does not have authority and the Owner of the product has authority, therefore, if we combine the two in one person, we should just be honest and call that person a regular project manager (possibly with some Agile skills).

Other combinations (PO - team member, SM - team member) also have disadvantages, but less harmful.