The Idea of a Twin-PO

Initial Situation

If you have the situation that the PO of your project is part of your customer you need to make sure his thoughts arrive in your project team (service provider) on the other side;

Communication of PO’s ideas and expectations to the whole team can be tough

In our case sovanta was the service provider for requirements engineering, designing and developing an application for mobile devices. The customer had the role of a typical Product Owner:

• Focusing on budget and timeline
• Making decisions on different designs
• and taking care of the Sprint-Boards, especially prioritizing Tickets in the Backlog.
• (…)

But looking to the workload of the PO and expectations on both sides, we had to ensure the PO gets support and updates (on a higher level) frequently.

Seamless and honest relationship to the customer

So our task was to create a common understanding of the project between customer and service provider (sovanta). This was only possible by creating a “twin” of the PO –

We need a Twin-PO — an ambassador of the customer within sovanta!

The role as a Twin-PO needs to report to the team

The fundament of this twin PO is, beside a common professional understanding, a good sense of human understanding of the needs & wants of the original PO.

In this project, the team wanted me to fulfill this Twin-PO role because I was anyway deep within the process to prepare the ticket’s content. So I was easy for me to write down and visualize the customer needs.

In this context I would like to recommend my article about writing User Stories.

Basic Team Set-Up

See this overview to understand the team set-up

A seamless communication between PO and Twin-PO is necessary

The Doing

Beside the regular daily meetings for detailed sprint monitoring, the Twin-PO (me) talked to the PO every week to ensure and set the right direction, according to time (prioritizing tickets etc.) and budget (canceling or adapting different UX patterns). This direction affected corresponding tickets. A side effect was that our project manager was also relieved.

A regular honest meeting with your Twin-PO can set and keep the right course

My Experience as a UX-Designer

For me as a UX Designer, I got insights into the project management processes and learn from it, while also understand better why the customer made certain decisions.

Sometimes political aspects lead to other processes for the overall UX. These aspects can be decisions made by higher management on customer side.
In this situation it is necessary to find the best way out – together with your (Twin-)PO.

The more you talk directly to a PO, the better you are able to read between the lines and understand certain, most of the time political decisions. Before action as a Twin-PO there were often communication gaps between project management and design. Personally, I prefer talking to the customer/PO directly. Additionally it gives you better opportunities to fight for and sell your UX design.