Update: I forgot that Kevin Rutherford also suggested the word "director". Great minds, etc.

Mark Smeltzer has come up with an alternative to Appraisers: Product Directors. I like that. It puts the focus on the product, not on managing the team. It connotes movement and responsiveness. Unlike the common metaphor of driving projects, it doesn't imply that other people are passive passengers. Instead, they're active participants in a joint project. If the word makes you think of a movie director, it also brings to mind that person charged with having the clearest idea of the end product during production. It also ought to have connotations of balancing features and cost, of producing the most you can within a given budget. Sometimes it does, though directors get notorious for the opposite.

We also talked a bit about "ScrumMaster" and what might be a more business-friendly term. Mark points out:

Making an analogy to the film industry, the AD (Assistant Director) roleembodies many of the ideas and responsibilities associated withScrumMasters. In the end, that may be what I go with: Assistant ProductDirector.

One thing I learned from the smattering of email: if told to link a name to one property of the role, different people have very different ideas of what that one property should be. Trying to pick a name within the project might lead to a useful discussion (reminiscent of Gause and Weinberg's heuristic for naming projects in Exploring Requirements). Or, in the wrong hands, it might lead to the most tedious and pointless discussion possible.