One Product Owner may have multiple Teams
Description
While one Team must have one PO as a reference person prioritising their work, one PO might work with multiple Teams if needed and if possible.
Rationale
One of the most common misunderstandings in Scrum is to assume that there is a 1:1 relationship between Teams and Product Owners, i.e. that every Team must have a different Product owner. While the Scrum Guide is very clear that “The Product Owner is one person, not a committee”, there is no limitation on the number of Teams a Product Owner can work with. Actually, with the 2020 version of the Scrum Guide the idea that multiple Teams working on the same product share the same Product Owner is explicitly stated: “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”.
For very large products there are obviously limitations in the number of Teams that a Product Owner can work with, and these topics are discussed in several parts of this document. It is however important to state that the 1:1 relationship between Teams and Product Owners is a basic structural problem present in many Scrum implementations.
Ideally, a single Product will have a single Product Owner providing absolute clarity of prioritisation decisions, a clear point of stakeholder engagement and minimum coordination overhead. For this reason, as we scale, our default assumption is that we will retain a single Product Owner up until the point that the mental workload exceeds the practical limit for a single person.