Proxy Product Owner

After reading Przemyslaw's blog post about a Customer Team Member, I decided to write down my own experience.

In my current Project we work with a Proxy Product Owner. The reason why we do this is because our project's stake holders are representatives of several regional companies. Every regional company has their own vote in the matter.

Since we do want a single product owner on site (most of the time) we decided to introduce one of my colleagues as the product owner. In workshops together with the stakeholders he formed a vision of the product we needed to build.

After each sprint (we have sprints of 3 weeks) there is a workshop where new functionality is shown and upcoming features (highest in the backlog) are discussed. During these workshops we at least have two of our developers present.

In my experience this works very well. We have a product owner we can easily communicate with and has a clear understanding of the wishes of our client.