The 2020 Scrum Guide defines an increment as ”a concrete stepping stone toward the product goal. Each Increment is additive to all prior Increments and thoroughly verified, ensuring that all Increments work together. To provide value, the Increment must be usable…The entire scrum team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment for every Sprint”.

In scrum, a product increment is whatever you previously built, plus anything new you just finished in the latest sprint, all integrated, tested, and ready to be delivered or deployed. Without a usable product increment, development teams are delaying the delivery of value and are missing opportunities to get real user feedback and adapt the product to ensure customer satisfaction. On the other hand, incremental releases allow for fast feedback, quicker innovation, continuous improvement, rapid adaptation to change, and more delighted customers.

The Sprint begins with Sprint Planning and ends with the Sprint Retrospective. Each event depends upon the successful completion of the previous event to ensure that teams can inspect and adapt. If the Daily Scrum for a Sprint happens before the Sprint Planning event for that Sprint, the team can’t inspect their plan and adapt it because they don’t have a plan yet. If the Sprint Planning event for the next Sprint happens before the Sprint Retrospective for the previous Sprint is completed, the team can’t adequately plan for the upcoming Sprint. They don’t yet know what improvements they will be making to their interactions, processes, or tools for the upcoming Sprint.

True leadership is a representation of the way you work with your team to achieve goals. A true leader makes an effort to help develop their team's skills so they can reach their full potential. They lead by example and establish strong, trusting relationships to ensure success within the team and for the organization as a whole.

Trust is the bedrock of self-organizing agile teams. Trust allows agile teams to communicate quickly and respond rapidly to changes as they emerge. Without sufficient trust, team members can waste effort and energy hoarding information, forming cliques, dodging blame, and covering their tracks. A climate of trust provides the foundation for effective team processes, adaptability, and high performance.

The output of a Sprint is a usable Product Increment. "Usable" means the stakeholders can see the product working as if it were released. The increment is the verified sum of all the Product Backlog Items completed during a sprint, plus all previous increments produced in the current and past sprints. Because of this, the increment needs to be integrated with the ones produced in past sprints. It must be in usable condition, regardless of whether the Product Owner decides to release it or not. The Product Owner is responsible for deciding when to release the Product Increment.

A Product Owner must be an expert in the business domain and industry. To understand customer requirements better and translate them into product requirements, a Product Owner must be well-versed in business logic as well as the technical capabilities of the product. It is a diverse role that requires a mix of several skills and experience for high performance.

If the Product Owner has this authority, he can respond to the changing needs of the customer and the marketplace. If not, he is blocked from being effective and may need approval on all Product Backlog Item decisions which causes a waste of time, by the Product Owner, and waste in the effort, by the Scrum Team.

The product owner is a technical role. You can’t become a great PO if you don’t know the ins and outs of development, design, agile framework, software development, scrum approach, and IT infrastructure. Technical skill is defined as a specialized skill that is used to perform a specific task such as programming and software development. The agile product owner must be technically sound because backlog management and prioritization are technical tasks. It can’t be done effectively if the PO doesn’t understand the development and design processes and has no knowledge of how software development works.

Product Owner’s need is almost there on all the events except Daily Scrum because Daily Scrum is a time-boxed event for the Development Team to inspect and adapt daily. When a Product Owner is not available during the Sprint, it is one of the great impediments. It will certainly affect the ability of the Development Team to come up with a “done” product increment. If there is no Product Increment at the end of the Sprint, then the Sprint Goal cannot be reached.