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Comment by Dervall | Hacker News Reader

I believe the problem lies in the difficulty of fully grokking the project owner role. It's nontraditional and not very glamorous.

Department heads are not product owners. In fact, I am a firm believer that being in any way responsible for staff is generally incompatible with the product owner role.

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Yep, which just adds to the implausibility of this person existing on-hand in an organization. But if we can't find product owners in the wild reliably, how do we as consultants help nurture them in the projects we are engaged in, and help our projects and clients succeed?

That is quite a problem, especially since the product owner should ideally be someone with a vested interest in the product, which sort of implies that you cannot use a consultant as a ersatz product owner. Unless you intend to keep the consultant on for basically forever.

I has the luxury of working with a good product owner once. We recruited him for the task at hand, so he had no background in the organization doing nothing other than his PO duties. This turned out to be a great boon, and managed to avoid the usual pitfalls of developer-turned-PO or boss-also-doing-PO.

I'm not sure if we can find them reliably but we can reliably identify them: you need an engineer (better: a system architect) tinted with things like "usability", "UX design" and similar. He or she will be technical enough to drive the development team as a PO and have enough social skills to extract information from the client. A consultant will be fine -- maybe even better than a person from within the client's org.

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