Communication Conduits Over Product Owners
Because there is a wide range of potential stakeholders, it is difficult for a single person to represent them all, yet this is something that Agile teams often strive to do. Scrum (www.implementingscrum.com) is a partial methodology that focuses on project and requirements management that has a role called product owner, the single person who is responsible for prioritizing the team's requirements. Yet, in practice there proves to be two critical aspects to this role: first as a stakeholder proxy within the development team and second as a project team representative to the overall stakeholder community as a whole. Product owners are in effect a communication conduit between the project team and its stakeholders.
Internally, the primary goal is to get the team information and decisions in a timely manner. That doesn't necessarily mean that the information has to come directly from the product owner, they instead may choose to put the team in contact with the appropriate expert stakeholders. Their primary external goal is to make the team's progress visible to the overall stakeholder community and thereby build up people's trust in the team's ability to deliver high-quality working software. Because the product owner is a communication conduit between these two groups, they often find themselves needing to define, communicate, and negotiate everyone's rights and responsibilities (see www.agilemodeling.com/essays/activeStakeholderParticipation.htm for some suggestions).
The role of product owner on Scrum teams greatly simplifies things for developers because they're the ONE person to go to for getting answers from the outside world, but in practice, all this really accomplishes is dumping the complexities of working with stakeholders onto their shoulders. Because Scrum provides little advice for people in this role, they quickly find that they need to supplement Scrum with the techniques of Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD), in particular, those pertaining to agile requirements analysis.
