At some point, you've probably wondered if you might be able to be both a team's product owner and its scrum master.
Banish that thought.
To see why, let's look back in history at the job of being a pirate ship captain.
A Stanford professor studied this by having his MBA students design the jobs of a 17th century pirate captain ship.
They designed a job that lumped together two areas of responsibility.
The first type of tasks are known as star tasks.
These are the strategic work of deciding which ships to attack, commanding the crew during battle, negotiating with the other captains,
and so on.
The second type tasks, are know as guardian tasks These the operational work distributing the pirate booty, settling conflict,
punishing crew members, organizing care for the wounded.
The problem with this job description is that it mixes star and guardian tasks.
There are very few individuals who excel at both types of task.
Star tasks require risk taking and entrepreneurship, whereas guardian task require conscientiousness and consistency.
A pirate captain good at identifying ships to attack and at leading his crew into battle would likely be bored by the administrative minutiae of the Guardian tasks.
To make matters worse, people tend to spend most of their time doing what they're good and what enjoy.
This means it is even harder to succeed when mixing roles that require different skills.
Pirates solve the problem by having two leaders on each ship, a captain responsible for the star tasks and a quarter master general responsible the guardian tasks.
Scrum teams should do the same.
Have a product owner perform the Star Tasks of establishing a vision for a project, defining the best outcomes the product can create for its users,
and defining features that will get it there.
but also have a scrum master to perform the guardian tasks, those tasks that protect a team from distractions and that improve collaboration and focus.
I have, of course, seen teams with one person as both scrumm master and product owner.
Each has been an exceptional person, perhaps the blackbeards of Scrum.
However, in each case, my reaction was to think how much better that person could have done their job if enabled to work in only one of the two roles.
I think something is lost when doing both roles, remember most people don't excel at both star and guardian tasks.
So can you fill both role?
Perhaps, but consider what you might lose when both doing roles?