Is There Ever a Good Time For Multiple Product Owners?

According to the scrum guide, there should be one product owner who is in charge of the product vision and decides what to do, to create a better product (Not how to do it!)

The Scrum Guide states:

“The Product Owner is one person, not a committee.”

Yet, in some environments companies build products that are so complex and big that they need multiple teams to get the job done.

For these situations the Scrum Guide states:

“If Scrum Teams become too large, they should consider reorganizing into multiple cohesive Scrum Teams, each focused on the same product. Therefore, they should share the same Product Goal, Product Backlog, and Product Owner.”

Contradictory to these suggestions, I observe that several companies feel the urgency to have multiple product owners for these situations. (They often argue that they “inspected and adapted” and in their case it is a necessary step to make Scrum work.)

Let me share my thoughts on that.

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