Proxy Product Owner in Distributed Agile Development, Do this work?

Proxy Product Owner 

Yes it worked well in our case. There are reasons to it.

Scenario: Teams were distributed at three locations (Development team at two locations in India whereas PO, SM at US). 

Challenges Faced: 

1) Different Time Zones, Conflicting working hours, Poor Communication has impacted overall effectiveness of Scrum. 

2) The overlap was of few hrs. leading to major communication issues with Product owner, further causing delays due to lack of communication. 

3) There is an inevitably cultural difference and language barriers since teams were distributed & sometimes it create misunderstanding & confusion, resulting in unnecessary errors.

4) Since team members did not interacted face to face & only communicates over the call, Collaboration was a challenge, leading to creation of silos. There was lack of trust and accountability as sub teams have been formed due to formation of Silos.

5) Existing Product Owner was business savvy have less IT systems experience & sometimes did not able to understand the challenges faced by development team.

6) On the bandwidth front as well, PO had been over loaded since he was extensively involved with users.

Solution Proposed:

Other than Vcon, collaboration tools, best usage of overlap hours (which addressed challenges 3 & 4) we recommended to bring in Proxy Product Owner role at offshore which has been approved by the customer.

Proxy PO not only helped team in resolving impediments/gaps when PO is not available but also acted as a bridge between the development team in India and the Product Owner (SMEs) in the US.

Things we did differently here:

Roles & Responsibilities had been clearly defined between PO & Proxy PO to avoid any confusion & avoid adding lag to decisions.

----The Product Owner was responsible for product backlog prioritization release planning, and whether to accept or reject stories. 

----Proxy PO was responsible for comprehending requirements and understanding rationale behind current prioritization of requirements along with writing stories (sometimes alone, sometimes assisting PO in writing stories) & maintaining backlog at story level.

----Proxy PO to work with offshore team to convey and clarify business requirements during offshore working hours.

----Since team did not have much overlap hrs with onshore, presenting stories to the team during sprint planning had been delegated to Proxy PO as well.

Having said that, I do have seen cases where Proxy PO did not add value but become source of miscommunication & lag.

One of the reason for this is Proxy PO given absolutely no authority/no empowerment from Product Owner.

Here in our scenario, it not only worked well but helped in building big picture & more alignment towards business vision which ultimately lead to building team confidence and morale.