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Roles and ceremonies

What it is

Scrum defines three accountabilities — product owner, scrum master, developers — and four ceremonies: sprint planning, the daily stand-up, the sprint review and the retrospective. Each ceremony has one artefact it produces. If a ceremony produces nothing, it has become a status meeting.

Why it matters

Naming the accountabilities removes two of the commonest sources of paralysis: nobody can decide what to build, and everybody is accountable for everything. The ceremonies are the mechanism that keeps the sprint boundary honest — but only while each one still produces its artefact. Ceremonies are also where Scrum’s failure mode appears: they are easy to keep and easy to hollow out.

Core ideas

Three accountabilities, three different decisions

The product owner decides what and in what order; the developers decide how and how much; the scrum master removes obstacles and holds the process. Overlap is where the framework stops working.

Product owner   "Refunds before the export feature this sprint."
Developers      "We can do that if the refund item is split; the audit log
                 part will not fit."
Scrum master    "The audit-log dependency is blocking two sprints; I will
                 chase the decision this week."

Note that none of the three is a manager of the others.

Sprint planning produces a sprint goal, not a task list

The outcome is one sentence naming what the sprint achieves, plus a forecast of items. A task-by-task plan made in planning is discarded by day two.

Sprint goal: a customer can request a refund and see its status.
Forecast: 6 items, 2 stretch.

The daily stand-up is for the team

Fifteen minutes, about the work, not about people. Each person answers what changed toward the goal and what is in the way. An update delivered to a manager is a status report wearing the same name.

The review is where the product is inspected

Show the increment running to the people who can react — users, stakeholders, support. Collect what to do next, and make it visible in the backlog immediately.

The retrospective must produce one change

Two or three items, one owned by a named person, checked next time. A retrospective with no action is a complaint session, and the team learns to bring no complaints.

Practice

Label one ceremony’s artefact

For each of the four ceremonies, write the artefact it produced the last time it ran, and who consumes it.

Done when: every ceremony has a named artefact and a consumer, and you have identified the one that produced neither.

Close one retrospective loop

Take the single change your last retrospective agreed, write its owner and date, and check it at the start of the next retrospective.

Done when: the item is either done or has an owner and a new date, and the team can see the loop closing.

Common mistakes

  • The stand-up becoming a status report — the team optimises for looking busy; fix: keep it about the goal and the obstacles, with no manager asking for updates.
  • Sprint planning as a task breakdown — the plan is stale by day two; fix: produce a sprint goal and a forecast.
  • No sprint goal — the sprint is a container for unrelated items and cannot be evaluated; fix: write one sentence naming the achievement.
  • A review with no one who can react — no decisions come back and the increment is demonstrated to itself; fix: invite users and stakeholders who can decide.
  • Retrospectives without actions — the team stops raising anything; fix: one owned change per retrospective, checked next time.

Go deeper

Worked examples

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