The Role of the Product Champion

The product champion may have a wide variety of titles: product manager, project manager, marketing manager, engineering manager, IT manager, and project lead. But no matter the title, the job is the same. It's a big job. The champion must

• Manage the elicitation process and determine when enough requirements are discovered

• Manage the conflicting inputs from all stakeholders

• Make the trade-offs necessary to find the set of features that delivers the highest value to the greatest number of stakeholders

• Own the product vision

• Advocate for the product

• Negotiate with management, users, and developers

• Defend against feature creep

• Maintain a " healthy tension" between what the customer desires and what the development team can deliver in the release time frame

• Be the representative of the official channel between the customer and the development team

• Manage the expectations of customers, executive management, and the marketing and engineering teams

• Communicate the features of the release to all stakeholders

• Review the use cases and requirements to ensure that they conform to the true vision represented by the features

• Manage the changing priorities and the addition and deletion of features

• And never give up, never surrender

This is the only person to whom the Vision document can really be entrusted, and finding the right champion for this purpose is a key to project success or failure.