Agile Scrum – Can the Customer Be a Product Owner in a Project?

agileproduct-ownerscrum

I just had a discussion with a colleague about the Product Owner role: In a project where a customer organization has brought in a sofware developing organization (supplier), can the role of Product Owner be successfully held by the customer organization, or should it always be held by the supplier?

I always imagined, that the PO was the supplier organizations guy. The guy that ensured that the customer is happy, and continously fed with new and high-businessvalue functionality, but still an integral part of the developer organization. However, maybe I have viewed the PO role too much like the waterfall project manager.

My colleague made me think: If the customer organization is mature and proffessional enough, why not let a person from their camp prioritize the backlog?? That would put the PO role much closer to the business, thus being (in theory) better to assess the business value of backlog items. To me, that is an intriguing thought. But what are the implication of such a setup???

I look forward to your input.

Best Answer

What has @Thomas Owens described is common explanation of PO. I agree with it as a nice theory but practice is in my experience often far away. Why? Because:

  • Willing participant - at least for duration of the project PO is fulltime job. This can be serious problem for most customers. When working with 5-7 member team, PO can easily spend half a day by discussing user stories currently developed by the team (remember user story is only promise of future communication) and half a day by maintaining and refining product backlog to define user stories for upcoming sprints. IMHO PO should also verify completed user stories during the sprint as the necessary step to make them "done" and ready for review meeting where these completed features will be presented to customer and stakeholders (not to PO!).
  • Moreover PO can be considered as a real job position (in the same way as Scrum Master is). In such case you cannot expect to get good skilled PO at 99% of customers.
  • Financial responsibility - PO has financial responsibility for the project. Even in Scrum somebody has the responsibility and because there is usually no product manager or project manager the responsiblity usually is on PO. Financial responsibility means responsibility for success of the project, for correct implementation and understanding of customer needs, expectations and requirements. This can look like ideal situation for PO on customer side but delivery organization needs somebody involved in the project with financial responsiblity as well.

Scrum is not a standardized approach - it is just a blueprint with many variants. Because of that you can find projects where PO is from customer side or where PO is from delivery organization. Once you have PO from customer side make sure that he really does his job. I have seen the situations where official PO was from customer side but at the end it was only empty title to satisfy management expectation from delivery organization and most of his job was performed by some team member who secretly played his proxy. That was obviously bad because the result of the sprint was often dependent on proxy's understanding to customers business needs!

From my experience with customers (this can be only local) once any customer really demands to have his own PO it also means they are going to lead the project themselves - they don't look for delivery organization to lead the project. They look for organization which can sell them developers = not delivering implementation but a workforce.

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