The Hub of the PO Cycle: The Executive MetaScrum (EMS)

To fulfill the Product Owner role for the entire agile organization, the Chief Product Owners meet with executives and key stakeholders at an Executive MetaScrum event. This event is derived from the MetaScrum pattern5. It is the forum for Leadership and other stakeholders to express their preferences to the PO Team, negotiate priorities, alter budgets, or realign teams to maximize the delivery of value. At no other time during the Sprint should these decisions be made.

At the Executive MetaScrum a dynamic group of leaders sets the organizational vision and the strategic priorities, aligning all of the teams around common goals.  In order to be effective, the Chief Product Owner facilitates and each team’s Product Owner (or a proxy) must attend. This event occurs as often as needed- at least once per Sprint- to ensure an aligned backlog within the Scrum of Scrums.  Optimally, this group of leaders operates as a scrum team.

In the case of larger implementations where there are multiple Scrum of Scrums, there may be multiple MetaScrums which have their strategic backlog created and prioritized at an Executive MetaScrum.