Is team productivity a responsibility of the Product owner?
Recently somebody suggested to me that it should be the product owner’s responsibility to ensure that the Scrum team is as productive as possible.
My first reaction was to disagree. The team is responsible to always find ways to improve productivity. The Scrum Master is responsible to remove any productivity impediments. The product owner however, should focus on the vision and value of the product, not the productivity of the team.
However, queuing theory indicates that the Product Owner has a big impact on productivity.
The following chart illustrates the impact of batch size on the cycle time. The time it takes for a requirement (user story) to be implemented, depends on the utilisation of the team and on the size of the story (batch size). Utilisation of the team can be higher if batch sizes are smaller. If utilisation is too high, cycle time will increase and productivity will drop. This will happen sooner with larger batch sizes.
Another reason to keep your user stories as small as possible.