What is the Role of a Stakeholders?

Background

The role of Stakeholders is to provide feedback on the product being developed. Stakeholders are people who have an interest in the product but are not actually producing it. Some potential examples of stakeholders include:

Customers: represent the end users of the products developed (and may be internal or external).

Management: represent the interests of the business.

Executive Management (general)

Functional managers of team members

Field personnel

Application experts

Sales

Support

Services

Training

Other Scrum Teams

Responsibilities

These are key contributors to the product backlog. In reality there are two classes of people here - the customer and customer proxies. Also note that the disciplines (such as Development, Certification, Internationalization / Localization and Documentation) are typically considered “stakeholders” when there are activities that are not directly involved in “implementing”.

The primary role of stakeholders is to provide feedback to the Scrum Team. In particular the Product Owner uses the information provided by stakeholders to adjust the Product Backlog.

Additional Information

When moving to agile / Scrum approach the The Scrum Team typically has the advantage of knowing what will happen because they have been through training. Stakeholders often do not have this background. To address see How Can We Introduce Scrum to Our (Customer or Field) Stakeholders?

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