When organizations scale Scrum, they often face a common problem: the Product Owner cannot be in multiple places at once. The typical response is to appoint a Proxy Product Owner -- someone who "holds down the fort" while the real decision-maker remains elsewhere. This approach is almost always a mistake.
Having a proxy PO can quickly become an antipattern. The critical issue is decision-making authority. A Proxy PO lacks the power to make real decisions. They act as a buffer between the team and the actual decision-maker, which slows everything down and removes accountability from where it needs to sit.
A Chief Product Owner is fundamentally different. Both the CPO and the Team POs they work with possess autonomous decision-making authority within their respective scopes. No one is a placeholder for someone else.
What a Chief Product Owner Does
The CPO operates at the strategic level across multiple Scrum teams:
- Sets a strategic vision for the whole product portfolio
- Creates a single, prioritized backlog that Team POs decompose for their teams
- Coordinates release planning across teams
- Establishes uniform quality standards
- Resolves cross-team dependencies
- Monitors effectiveness metrics
- Leads coordination meetings between Team POs
Three Scenarios Where Organizations Get This Wrong
Scenario 1: One large product, multiple teams. The instinct is to appoint proxies to represent the PO with each team. The right answer is to establish empowered Team POs for each team, with a CPO coordinating priorities and resolving dependencies above them.
Scenario 2: One PO managing multiple products. This is simply too much for one person. The solution is dedicated POs for each product, with CPO oversight ensuring alignment across the portfolio.
Scenario 3: Geographic or timezone separation. When leadership is remote from the team, organizations create local proxies who cannot actually decide anything. The correct approach is locally-positioned Team POs with the authority to make decisions, coordinating daily with a CPO who sets direction.
Why Decision Speed Matters
A decisive PO who can provide answers to the team quickly is a key element of success. Teams with faster decision-making show a 25% higher chance of success. Every hour a team spends waiting for a proxy to escalate a question to the real decision-maker is a delay the Proxy PO model builds in by design.
If you find yourself needing a Proxy PO, the real question is why the actual Product Owner cannot be available to the team. Fix the availability problem. If scaling is the constraint, build a CPO and Team PO structure where every person in the hierarchy has real authority -- not a chain of messengers.