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I was managing an R&D team for a software vendor in 2000 when the company hired my friend Adam as our product manager. We worked in the same office, so we quickly realized the value of his meeting weekly with the team to review progress, answer questions, and consider alternatives. Although he belonged to a different organizational unit, I naturally "annexed" him to the project community (a term I hadn't known then).
One day the VP of R&D, my boss's boss, arrived for a visit. She saw me and Adam talking in the hallway and demanded to know why. When I explained our working relationship, she started yelling at me: "If you have questions about the product, you come to me! He doesn't know anything — I have all the answers!"
Even though I had been used to receiving requirements and answers mostly from my management, I was disappointed that working directly with my "business representative" was frowned upon.
Nowadays, with Agile, this probably wouldn't be happening. I'd argue that more likely, there's no business representative to approach!
You might be wondering, "how come? Agile projects without customers?"
Agile has shed a powerful light on developer-customer relations. Both XP and Scrum want to see an empowered, informed person acting as customer. Scrum even calls the role Product Owner, which presupposes ownership, of the project deliverables, by the business. (I think the term "Product Owner" is linguistically stronger than "Customer" or "Lead Customer" and can get better traction.)
In many places I've coached there were precious few potential customers to go around. Their client-facing work barely left them any time at all. Add Agile's expectation of frequent communication, and their schedules were thrown into disarray and multi-tasking was rampant.
This is a vestige of the old way we ran things: business on one side, delivery on the other, documents shall be exchanged and managers shall communicate. This "broken telephone" didn't work so well for product definition, planning to capacity, or even utilization.
Now we know that we need greater business representation. People on the business side can no longer "just be" marketing / sales / etc. Part of their duties becomes to flesh out (incrementally, iteratively and collaboratively) what the delivery side can do to enhance the business.
Being an Agile Customer becomes part of their job description.
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