When the customer is not at the site, the Product Owner of the team is but a proxy that tries to translate the customers needs to detailed functionality. To make sure the customer is happy, the Product Owner needs to discuss solutions, and needs to get questions answered quickly on behalf of the developing team. We have collected and tried out various ways to bridge the gap between the team and the remote customer, who is the real Product Owner. This talk gives some examples on what went well, and what can be done better.

How long did it take before your last project was able to put a first version into production? How long was the release cycle after that? The basic premise of this tutorial is that any project that is unable to release to production every three months has a problem. The product owner should actively work towards reducing the length of releases. The idea of releasing often is not new. Most agile approaches recommend frequent releases. This tutorial is based on our study of concrete strategies projects use to actually reduce the length of releases and find a Minimal Releaseable Product.

Learn from the experience of a team that has been working geographically distributed for over a year. Learn the importance of solving communication challenges using good practices and an including work atmosphere. Discover freely available web tools that will help you solve most of the daily scrum tasks.