Precisely — someone from the “real” world who understands the business, the pain points, and what will bring real value to the users. When discussing together, brilliant ideas are born. Often, business does not understand what benefits IT can give, and IT doesn’t understand the pain points of everyday work.

Sometimes even minor changes can make a huge difference for users. Let me give a straightforward example. Payroll had a system to run trial payout for thousands of employees. Each month they ran the payroll and sent the list to various offices worldwide, asking them to check the attached file and write back if there were any irregularities. They tracked changes in Excel. The payroll expert asked if it would be possible to automatically scan through all mails coming in and enter the results into Excel. The baffled developer wondered why in the world they wanted such a complicated solution. Why not put up a web page showing the trial payroll filtered by the office and assigned payroll assistant. Then they could mark the change directly on the webpage.

As the payroll expert did not know what could be done that person would never have come up with that solution. The IT person would never have known the pain point.

All in all, it took a sprint to get the functionality into prod, and it meant the payroll section could do each monthly payroll five days earlier…

If you have a PO that is to far away from everyday life and just lives in the team you might just miss these little things.