The first thing we did this week was to hold a sprint retrospective. And one of the first things we decided was that I should step down as ScrumMaster.

Which I gladly did.

In recent months I had been travelling more and more, attending more and more meetings, and it had become clear that there was no way I could be sufficiently present with the team to qualify as ScrumMaster.

However, my frequent interactions with the business/marketing/field people qualified me now for arguably the most misunderstood role in the Scrum process: that of Product Owner.

Now that I am free from the responsibilities of a ScrumMaster, I realize how much I had underrated the role of a Product Owner. And in particular, I realize now that my frequent interactions with the rest of the company had made me the de facto Product Owner a long time ago.

I still have a lot to learn before I can become fully effective in this new role, but if I should summarize my understanding of the Product Owner’s role in one sentence it would be this:

The Product Owner’s sacred duty is to keep the product backlog non-empty and prioritized.

Corollary: the team should never, ever find themselves wondering what to do next. Contrary to what I always believed, it’s not the ScrumMaster’s job to make sure the team knows what to do. It’s the Product Owner’s.