Thanks for your comment Jim. I am glad that you liked the article. I write more about agile product delivery here: Succeeding with Product Delivery and Scrum: 10 Tips for Product People Hope this helps!

Thanks for sharing your perspective Carlos. Using a strategic product manager role and a tactical product owner one is the scaling strategy suggested by SAFe. But you can happily manage a large product without using the two roles, as I explain in my article Scaling the Product Owner Role. Hope this helps.

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your feedback and question. I generally recommend to ask the client play the product owner role or to be a stakeholder and assign ownership to the agency (supplier), as this creates clear responsibilities and ensures effective decision-making. The first option is preferred for me, and it’s the model I have been using for many years with the agency that designs and develops this website. It gives me full control over the product, but it requires me to make myself available and work with the team (which I enjoy btw).

The second option still sees the client involved in the development process, for example, by attending sprint reviews or testing early product increments, but the product decisions lie with the agency product owner and must be accepted by the client organisation. To make this work, I recommend first agreeing on a product strategy that states the value proposition, target market, key features, and business goals of the product and possibly a product roadmap. This sets a joint direction and provides the agency product owner with the context to make the right decisions.

Does this help?

great article, even 7 years on it’s still hitting the nail on the head! I had a question in relation to the Proxy PO, which seems like an “anti-pattern”. But in some scenarios, when the “real” PO is a paying customer and the Scrum team is an external contract team, does it make sense?

The reason I ask is that a lot of our clients just don’t have that much interest in being involved a Scrum process nor do they want to be dealing with the developers directly; they just want their weekly or bi-weekly update. However they’re also not great at deciding entirely what they want up-front either 🙂 So we end up with a kind of semi-waterfall, semi-agile type development process. (Internally we use sprints but the customers could care less really)

In these cases we use the PO as both a proxy to *and* ambassador from the client, in the sense that their job is to be very familiar with both the customer’s business and the problem domain in general, so that if we on the dev team ask something like “hey, you asked for X but we think Y is way better” they know enough to either say “Well that’s because there is a law that requires Y for this client’s business area ” (so, the business domain), or “We have to use Y because this specific customer’s clients depend on it” (client knowledge) or maybe “Hmm, yes you know that will work just fine, go for it”
And where it’s unknown, they can go ask the “real” customer and feedback to the team, albeit not in “real-time”.

Does that sound like an effective PO role to you in the context of a contract dev team situation? If not, would you have any suggestions for what we might call this role?

Thanks!

Hi Amit,

Working with user stories and the product backlog is a collaborative effort. The product owner should ensure that the backlog contains helpful items, and the team members help the product owner adapt the backlog based on the latest stakeholder feedback. This includes analysing the impact of any changes. You can find out more here:

http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/grooming-the-product-backlog/

I am still looking for answer of a specific query.

Product owner gathers a requirement and share it as an user story with the scrum team.

My question is that who shoudl be responsible to do impact analysis on the User story. Is it product owner or business analyst, if both are available in the team?