The Art of Lean Software Development

An All-Too-Common Problem

Although the ideal is to have CRACK customer representatives on site, they often are not available throughout the development effort. Perhaps the customer can’t afford to dedicate someone full-time to the project, or the customer consists of individual users. In cases like these, customer proxies can take the place of customer representatives.

Customer proxies should embody the same CRACK characteristics as customer representatives, but they also need to be willing to stand up to the development team and even management on behalf of the customer. Often, someone who has used the customer’s products in the past or has experience working in the same business domain as the customer can be an effective customer proxy. Although he may not be as familiar with a specific customer’s thinking, he must at least be knowledgeable about the problem domain.

Earlier we pointed out that product owners shouldn’t be members of the development team due to the potential for conflicts of interest. Because customer proxies often serve as product owners and champion the customer’s point of view, they should not be members of the development team either.