Product Goal

The 2020 version of the Scrum Guide makes the Product Goal transparent in the Product Backlog; a long-term commitment which is emergent.

Is your Product Owner unable to communicate the Product Goal to the team, so it can then be transparently managed? If so, what does that tell you about product ownership? There are all sorts of reasons why teams fail to increment Scrum properly. 

Why are you building the product you're building? Besides making money.

Scrum is all about growth. So the fact that you currently don't have a Product Goal might be a trigger to discuss this with the team, define together what you understand about it and what this means for you, plan the improvements and start working on them ;-) 

Any Product Owner that knows their job is creating a Product Goal.  They may not explicitly call it a Product Goal but they have one. And they have communicated it to the team doing the work to build the product.  @Mark Adams points out the main premise of a Product Goal.  @Ian Mitchell mentions the way of identifying if a goal exists. 



You have been creating or managing to a Product Goal for the last 4 years, it may not have been formerly recognized.  Much like the way the current edition of the Scrum Guide has started to recognize it.  

The 2017 edition of the Guide never calls out a Product Goal but it alludes to the presence many times.  The primary statements that have lead me to the need of Product Goals from that edition are:

Opening paragraph of the section describing the Product Backlog:

The Product Backlog is an ordered list of everything that is known to be needed in the product. It is the single source of requirements for any changes to be made to the product. The Product Owner is responsible for the Product Backlog, including its content, availability, and ordering.

From the section describing the Product Owner

The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. Product Backlog management includes:

• Clearly expressing Product Backlog items;
• Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions;
• Optimizing the value of the work the Development Team performs;
• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next; and,
• Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed.

If the Product Owner is responsible for the Product Backlog that contains everything mentioned above and the Product Owner is responsible for managing that backlog per the items listed above what better way of doing so than having a statement that matches this description from the 2020 Guide

The Product Goal describes a future state of the product which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against. The Product Goal is in the Product Backlog. The rest of the Product Backlog emerges to define “what” will fulfill the Product Goal.