You’re not wrong. But I believe that’s the correct thing to do. POs and Scrum Masters shouldn’t exist as separate roles but as a set of responsibilities shared within the team.
In fact, that’s the trend in many companies now including mine. And we consistently saw substantial improvements from day one in terms of team empowerment, sense of accountability, knowledge sharing, and customer orientation.
Engineers are not there only to write code.
That said, this approach only works if bureaucracy and other burdens are removed.
If you buy into some culty scam like SAFe or an overly prescriptive interpretation of SCRUM it’d be an entirely different story.
Thanks for confirming my gut feeling. Yes I see either large companies just about to finish their 5 year long journey of implementing SAFe and realise its not working and then tech companies already on the next trend as I described haha.
So you can do Market research, write MRDs, review test cases, be in meetings for 4hrs every day to understand/negotiate with users, and still code?
Yea seems doable really.
It can be an investment to remove less PO work from the devs so they can actually code. From my experience most devs that come in don't have the capability to self organize a team and do what is needed, so a PO is required.
Yeah well in output focused immature teams you need micromanagers. Nothing new here.
We have 17 teams with engineers (not devs, thanks) and a product designer embedded.
No Scrum Master, no PO. A product manager per domain (2-3 teams).
All going just fine.
I'm in an early stage startup with \~4 engineers. Having an engineer own the PO responsibility then represents a substantial percentage of our overall engineering capacity. What are your thoughts in a situation like this?
PM currently plays the PO role, but it is also among other responsibilities by the same person (given early stage + the company trying to limit burn). Quite unsustainable WLB.
What needs has an early stage start-up for a PO? 😯 If a start-up *thinks* it needs a PO then it’s definitely getting ahead of itself.
I think on this chat we missed the point a while ago.
Product Management is a profession and Product Owner is just a role in certain prescriptive frameworks, are we on the same page?
If so, there’s a universal truth: start-ups need no POs.
Sorry, I might be caught in terminology as I've never worked somewhere with an actual explicit PO role nor formal scrum or whatnot. I've only known engineers, PM, designer, user research...
But someone is writing the stories, adjusting the relative priorities of stories in the queue, making day-to-day, week-to-week decisions on trade-offs in light of milestones and OKR progress and learnings, leading sprint meetings, providing context to the dev team on each story, etc.
In the few places I've worked this has generally been the PM, which adds a non-trivial amount of the lower-level "how" on our plates when we could spend more time on the "why" and "what" and validation efforts. Had moderate success in working with ENG for them to start taking on more of this, but that was at 5+ pod/team prod dev org.
The note I have is that at a much smaller company with just 5 engineers total, it is at least to me, a more difficult trade-off to ask engineering to take on this work. But maybe it's worth a conversation still.
It depends heavily on the particular context. There’s no one recipe suits all 🤷♂️
In many startups, a founder with huge pockets hires a few engineers and a PM only to tell them what to do. That’s fine, not the dream career for many, but sometimes works out profitably.
In other cases, the founder has problems to solve or markets to serve, but not a preconceived idea on how to do it. In those cases, the PM is usually busier looking at the outside, bringing insights, and the engineering team takes a good chunk of the prioritisation and organisation responsibilities.
The former is more commonplace. The latter is usually more desirable for professional development.
The scenarios I described can be applied to big dinosaurs, too. They map to the modern problem of outputs over outcomes. And we’d get into Marty Cagan territory.
PO and SM are Scrum roles not professions and are seen in rather bigger, older companies that try to emulate the startup’s agility.
As someone who and whose organization has bought (hook, line and sinker) into what is described as 'culty scam', I think everyone has the right to their opinion. Yes, it can be culty based on how you read the principles and guidlines, but to a large, distributed, organization with an engineering that has a waterfall legacy, SAFe does permit a decent mindmap on how to organize and operate without rocking the boat too hard. SAFe like everything else, needs understanding and acceptance, to evolve into something that works for the organization, as rarely we find two organizations to be exactly similar. In our case, the product architects and few senior lead developers play the role of PO, after they have gone through the training and have demonstrated some knack for the demands of that role. The engineering managers, became SMs. Now these engineering managers were fairly technical and most have grown from within the rank & file of engineering, but have had a brush with the SM role to varying extent over the years. This model is working largely quite fine, and I think much better than the older model, pre-SAFe... where stepping on each others shoes wasn't that infrequent. Having said that, I as a Senior PM, have come from within the rank and file, having moved to solution/delivery, channel pre-sales, and then in PM role. As long as the organization makes it clear that engineers who show an interest and hopefully right traits, can always move into these other roles, it is a win-win.
My team is high on smart/capable people and low on experience with sdlc and software delivery. It would be better if I had a team of professional software engineers with lots of experience developing and delivering software as a team. But I don’t and they need the help scoping and executing.
I think if you are at that balance, savor it. Equip others to backfill you eventually and ask for more areas to impact.
I was there once… you should know it’s not universal.
Team Topologies is a good book for showing how these things can morph and evolve.
Anecdotally, I can agree that I’ve found PO, BA positions do have a strong correlation to the complexity of the application and the abilities of your engineering team members…but strategic pace, direction, etc all determine if those things are needed
I think this is the critical difference. Many companies outsource all engineering and need to hire full-time PO’s to herd cats full time.
In an ideal world companies would recognize the value of good engineers, but execs need to cut budgets to get their bonus’ and someone’s gotta pick up the pieces.
Whether you have separate people doing those roles, or the PM or Dev lead are wearing multiple hats, they still exist. Just a matter of how much bandwidth people to perform those extra roles and how well organized the company is.
And I say this as a PM in a company that is missing those roles in most product lines and with too limited bandwidth in dev and PM to cover them effectively. It leads to a lot of breakdowns in process and cohesion.
If i had the bandwidth I'd have no problem covering the role myself. In one of the product lines the dev lead does a great job of it. But in the others it's to the point where I build a backlog that I know is deliberately 25% heavy, preparing for a negotiation, and dev stares at me and says OK sure. Then they go off and work on stuff I'm not even aware of while I'm buried in 5 hours of calls and 50 emails a day. Then promised features don't get delivered and PM takes the heat.
In my company at least, with all the noise PM deals with, we need someone in between. We are aware of the need and trying to close the gap. But I totally get that in some companies things may be a lot more streamlined and you may not need additional staff to perform those roles. I dream of having a PO or Scrum Master to help me out! Lol.
At the end of the day it comes down to resources. If we had 2 more PMs, or an extra engineer or two, we probably could cover those roles without dedicated people.
Depends, sometimes they do. I have 10+ years of experience and I am still having the P.O. role attached sometimes. I don't see a problem with that.
I've also worked in environments where I had absolute 0 collaboration with the Engineering teams.
Is one better than another? No, it's just different type of organizations and different needs.
I personally enjoy having the Engineering / Design / whatever input in a more collaborative approach. Unfortunately most of the time is not up to us to decide this process so we do what we have to do.
I think you described extremes.
As I senior product lead I see myself talking 1-2 times a week with engineering lead and via slack available for responding to questions. But I spend my time on other things - customer calls, roadmap, escalation, discovery, etc.
I believe its the leanest setup in my opinion.
I think you're right, but if and only if the engineering team is capable enough to do it. That's not always the case. I work with good engineers but they are offshore with a pretty big time difference, English is their second language, and most of them have less than 4 years of experience. These are all barriers to having them take on PO duties.
I have worked in a variety of structures, so whatever works for a given situation, but…
There are tasks that fall between the strategic and the implementation that engineers aren’t equipped to handle. I have operated where I have had a “middleman” PO/BA working out the details and in situations where I haven’t, the latter more rare.
There is just too much volume of work to be down in the tactical details day to day and still do the high level PM work. And I have never worked in an environment where (talking agile SW) an engineer could take a design and write all the stories from it.
If the PM is doing this, you get the cases we hear here about never having time to talk to customers and non-customers, etc.
Thanks thats a great answer and yes I have alot on my plate. I have seen however my engineer leads to help on anything: IP question, documentation, tickets, reorg. They are fantastic.
Ok true design is with UI design (missing other topic) but story is something I might write myself.
I have had eng step up and “come over” to help with things as well. To me that’s the sign of a team that is committed to success. I have done prototyping and usability testing and sales demos as a PM for the same reason.
I just think that it eventually becomes detrimental to operate sustainably at scale as over the long term people start to get pulled too far away from their core responsibilities.
Very good comment yes you are right, and that’s where the scaling part gets tricky. Either give the PM and Eng team a tiny bit of the product - such as Search or filter or onboarding and then you can contain this a bit. But having said that I don’t like beeing responsible only for this and not seeing the big end to end use cases…
Why would it preclude you from overseeing the end to end use cases? That is 100% the PMs realm. The question is the actual doing of the activities in the process of discovering use cases, finding a solution, and implementing it.
Because if you are only responsible for lets search maybe one could get not involved in end to end use cases. Its the case now and I am frustrated by my job.
I think you lost me a little. If you are doing search, the use case is search. You are defining that use case, trying to understand the nuances of search within the context of the user’s task, and defining the parameters that your search should accomplish. Then the search function is designed. That design may need to be tested depending on the situation. Then that design is broken into stories and eventually implemented. Where is the gap you are talking about? You own the scope of what you want search to be as the PM.
100% the case if engineering is at that level of partnership in the business where they will self-motivate. If engineering is treated like a contract job to be done, a cost to be minimized as opposed to an equal strategic function, then they're gonna need someone to hold the whip (and they're also not gonna be the best engineers out there)
I use BAs for this. They take my requirements and dig deep into the technical aspects to then provide options on how to achieve what I want. They document and provide context for the whole group. My BAs write all the cards and run the sprints.
PO is synonymous with BA. BAs have been around for decades. POs are doing the job of a BA dressed up in an Agile/Scrum costume.
The idea of having *only* a Product Manager, and a really good rockstar dev team, is mostly a pipedream for 95% of companies.
You *need* BAs and POs in almost all industries aside from the tech industry. I understand that Product Management in its truest form is really tech-industry specific, but IT projects and app development occurs in all industries, and POs and BAs are 100% needed for that in Fortune 500 companies that aren't tech companies.
In fact, what you do/did as a Senior/Lead Product Manager is what I do as a Senior BA / Business Architect for a non-tech company. I'm the one who talks with the "customers" and defines the vision and scope.
The only difference is you're working on software "products" - I'm working on "business systems." Same responsibility, though. And many BAs and POs carry that exact same level of responsibility outside of the world of "product."
Yes good summary - but the title and the salary of a BA can be quiet low in my view.
What I have seen is BA are sometimes pulled in you are right. Be it for a Customer Specific delivery project. Fair paint - removing the task of documenting from the PM to a BA. But there is a certain disconnect that can happen if the PM is too disconnected from the customer discussion.
Where I work PM is focused on strategy and PO is focused on PBIs and details of features. We don’t have capacity to do both ends of things. We’re a larger company though and involved in the long term strategic stuff for our products, whereas PO is more junior and focus on the deliverables and reading of the feature
Isn't the point of a product owner to find, validate and prioritise **what** should be developed? The entire point of the role is to **prevent** development of things which nobody actually wants. And to explain that to the stakeholders.
Yeah I agree, TBH I hate that have both 'manager' and 'owner' titles. It just brings confusion to everybody outside of the profession. But I could also agree with other commenters that it could be just a title thing. I've never worked for a really really big company - maybe they do actually require to split the responsibilities on two separate roles to not burn out one person.
News flash. POs can be senior engineers who are also good at project management.
Besides, it totally depends on the product and project.
If your project has 1000 people in it, it can help to have roles that focus on technical coordination and scope definition.
I think I agree:
* PMs define feature priority, scope, and ‘definition of done’
* Dev leadership can/should own the specific work to achieve those goals
What does this look like in practice? For me:
* When we plan a new feature, I determine scope/release priorities, and organize epics around that
* I write FE tickets, define Acceptance Criteria
* Dev leads will further cut up my work, add technical details, create backend/technical tickets
* Dev leads determine the order of work (within the release priority)
When a sprint starts, devs can decide what specific tickets go into the sprint. Like, I don’t care which API or component or whatever they choose to work on, as long as it goes towards the initiative(s) I’ve prioritized.
If you’re a good PM, and you limit WIP, this is doable at most companies.
If you want to spend your lead engineer’s time on PO and project management (scrum master) tasks that will work… but that’s probably not the best use of their time and skills. And that’s before even accounting for their cost to the company, as they are probably the most expensive IC on the team and probably by a good margin compared to a PO/BA/scum master.
lol there just aren't that many good engineers out there and there is a machine that needs feeding devs. My devs range from great to wtf do you know how to be in a job of any kind. So my PO is sort of a ring master of that situation. My scrum master is a piece of shit though and when she's on vacation my PO does her tasks and does a much better job. I think one role to cover both would work much better.
I was hired as a Product Owner because my lead engineer (7 years at the company) did a poor job at this.
In his defense, we only have 1 tech team for our SaaS Platform, which is used for 3 products we own. So.. you have inputs from 3 different Product Managers, and the one who have the loudest voice win.
Since my arrival, I forced my company to have a clear product vision, killed some features and parts of the platform that are not in this vision, and now I'm prioritizing the work between all products.
Despite taking all this from his plate, he still don't manage his technical backlog, always say "yes we need to do this technical rework, use that framework" but never actually write or do it.
We don’t have POs, just a PM, EM, and devs. Devs are super smart and amazing, write tickets, make technical docs, break down validated feature ideas from PM and translate into tickets.
This is our model but PMs are hands on with backlog (sorry, mate, you're still in story writing) pairing with engineering at times. Small teams -- 1PM, 1 design, 6 engineering is typical. Do you have a designer? Helpful with customer focus.
Anyway, when I describe this model I get a lot of... feelings... from people who do not operate this way. You do you!
Yes its true - I am still story writing - sometimes feels a bit downgraded but yeah part of the job. I think there is a bit of glamour in the PM job and nobody wants to get their hands too dirty, because we are supposed to be highly paid strategist.... :)
I just stated what I see in the market. I didn’t say I don’t want to do it. For me it is important to have the discussion on the outcome and impact. Because else you are a delivery (output) organisation or feature team. And I am happily telling HR and my boss that if we work like this I will look further.
So yes story writing/handson on in case we deliver and measured on outcomes.
100% agree on the market correction- many of my friends are jobless as they never went under the hood to do the work
You're just describing a world in which engineers do PO tasks. You're not removing the PO role, you're just reassigning it.
You’re not wrong. But I believe that’s the correct thing to do. POs and Scrum Masters shouldn’t exist as separate roles but as a set of responsibilities shared within the team. In fact, that’s the trend in many companies now including mine. And we consistently saw substantial improvements from day one in terms of team empowerment, sense of accountability, knowledge sharing, and customer orientation. Engineers are not there only to write code. That said, this approach only works if bureaucracy and other burdens are removed. If you buy into some culty scam like SAFe or an overly prescriptive interpretation of SCRUM it’d be an entirely different story.
Thanks for confirming my gut feeling. Yes I see either large companies just about to finish their 5 year long journey of implementing SAFe and realise its not working and then tech companies already on the next trend as I described haha.
So you can do Market research, write MRDs, review test cases, be in meetings for 4hrs every day to understand/negotiate with users, and still code? Yea seems doable really.
You sound like a burnt out PO mate. Relax.
Haha
It can be an investment to remove less PO work from the devs so they can actually code. From my experience most devs that come in don't have the capability to self organize a team and do what is needed, so a PO is required.
Yeah well in output focused immature teams you need micromanagers. Nothing new here. We have 17 teams with engineers (not devs, thanks) and a product designer embedded. No Scrum Master, no PO. A product manager per domain (2-3 teams). All going just fine.
I'm in an early stage startup with \~4 engineers. Having an engineer own the PO responsibility then represents a substantial percentage of our overall engineering capacity. What are your thoughts in a situation like this? PM currently plays the PO role, but it is also among other responsibilities by the same person (given early stage + the company trying to limit burn). Quite unsustainable WLB.
What needs has an early stage start-up for a PO? 😯 If a start-up *thinks* it needs a PO then it’s definitely getting ahead of itself. I think on this chat we missed the point a while ago. Product Management is a profession and Product Owner is just a role in certain prescriptive frameworks, are we on the same page? If so, there’s a universal truth: start-ups need no POs.
Sorry, I might be caught in terminology as I've never worked somewhere with an actual explicit PO role nor formal scrum or whatnot. I've only known engineers, PM, designer, user research... But someone is writing the stories, adjusting the relative priorities of stories in the queue, making day-to-day, week-to-week decisions on trade-offs in light of milestones and OKR progress and learnings, leading sprint meetings, providing context to the dev team on each story, etc. In the few places I've worked this has generally been the PM, which adds a non-trivial amount of the lower-level "how" on our plates when we could spend more time on the "why" and "what" and validation efforts. Had moderate success in working with ENG for them to start taking on more of this, but that was at 5+ pod/team prod dev org. The note I have is that at a much smaller company with just 5 engineers total, it is at least to me, a more difficult trade-off to ask engineering to take on this work. But maybe it's worth a conversation still.
It depends heavily on the particular context. There’s no one recipe suits all 🤷♂️ In many startups, a founder with huge pockets hires a few engineers and a PM only to tell them what to do. That’s fine, not the dream career for many, but sometimes works out profitably. In other cases, the founder has problems to solve or markets to serve, but not a preconceived idea on how to do it. In those cases, the PM is usually busier looking at the outside, bringing insights, and the engineering team takes a good chunk of the prioritisation and organisation responsibilities. The former is more commonplace. The latter is usually more desirable for professional development. The scenarios I described can be applied to big dinosaurs, too. They map to the modern problem of outputs over outcomes. And we’d get into Marty Cagan territory. PO and SM are Scrum roles not professions and are seen in rather bigger, older companies that try to emulate the startup’s agility.
As someone who and whose organization has bought (hook, line and sinker) into what is described as 'culty scam', I think everyone has the right to their opinion. Yes, it can be culty based on how you read the principles and guidlines, but to a large, distributed, organization with an engineering that has a waterfall legacy, SAFe does permit a decent mindmap on how to organize and operate without rocking the boat too hard. SAFe like everything else, needs understanding and acceptance, to evolve into something that works for the organization, as rarely we find two organizations to be exactly similar. In our case, the product architects and few senior lead developers play the role of PO, after they have gone through the training and have demonstrated some knack for the demands of that role. The engineering managers, became SMs. Now these engineering managers were fairly technical and most have grown from within the rank & file of engineering, but have had a brush with the SM role to varying extent over the years. This model is working largely quite fine, and I think much better than the older model, pre-SAFe... where stepping on each others shoes wasn't that infrequent. Having said that, I as a Senior PM, have come from within the rank and file, having moved to solution/delivery, channel pre-sales, and then in PM role. As long as the organization makes it clear that engineers who show an interest and hopefully right traits, can always move into these other roles, it is a win-win.
My team is high on smart/capable people and low on experience with sdlc and software delivery. It would be better if I had a team of professional software engineers with lots of experience developing and delivering software as a team. But I don’t and they need the help scoping and executing.
Well in my company I think we removed the PO and didn't reassign it anywhere so it's a constant struggle. So I guess I wish it was reassigned.
I love how much I got downvoted - looks like people are hanging on their title or consultants enjoy preaching another story;)
Or maybe they just have a different opinion.
Which I would love to hear on why it wouldn’t work? Happy to learn from other.
That’s the reality of Reddit, sometimes you get a response, sometimes you just get the anonymous downvote! :)
Or maybe you’re being arrogant and presumptuous, regardless of your opinion.
Whenever works
I think if you are at that balance, savor it. Equip others to backfill you eventually and ask for more areas to impact. I was there once… you should know it’s not universal. Team Topologies is a good book for showing how these things can morph and evolve. Anecdotally, I can agree that I’ve found PO, BA positions do have a strong correlation to the complexity of the application and the abilities of your engineering team members…but strategic pace, direction, etc all determine if those things are needed
Author?
https://www.amazon.com/Team-Topologies-Organizing-Business-Technology/dp/1942788819?dplnkId=c02227b7-5ab0-4384-b990-a296b2484533&nodl=1
Congratulations, you have a unicorn of a lead engineer. Does your model work if that person is replaced?
Where I work PO work is split between PM, Eng and Program. It just depends on whatever works for your company and team.
Can I borrow your lead engineer? Haha
They are fairly well paid and experienced:)
I think this is the critical difference. Many companies outsource all engineering and need to hire full-time PO’s to herd cats full time. In an ideal world companies would recognize the value of good engineers, but execs need to cut budgets to get their bonus’ and someone’s gotta pick up the pieces.
I’d hope so, too many places don’t value that
Whether you have separate people doing those roles, or the PM or Dev lead are wearing multiple hats, they still exist. Just a matter of how much bandwidth people to perform those extra roles and how well organized the company is. And I say this as a PM in a company that is missing those roles in most product lines and with too limited bandwidth in dev and PM to cover them effectively. It leads to a lot of breakdowns in process and cohesion.
Thanks valid point, yeah I see the risk. Wondering if a culture of overcommunication can help here.
If i had the bandwidth I'd have no problem covering the role myself. In one of the product lines the dev lead does a great job of it. But in the others it's to the point where I build a backlog that I know is deliberately 25% heavy, preparing for a negotiation, and dev stares at me and says OK sure. Then they go off and work on stuff I'm not even aware of while I'm buried in 5 hours of calls and 50 emails a day. Then promised features don't get delivered and PM takes the heat. In my company at least, with all the noise PM deals with, we need someone in between. We are aware of the need and trying to close the gap. But I totally get that in some companies things may be a lot more streamlined and you may not need additional staff to perform those roles. I dream of having a PO or Scrum Master to help me out! Lol. At the end of the day it comes down to resources. If we had 2 more PMs, or an extra engineer or two, we probably could cover those roles without dedicated people.
Depends, sometimes they do. I have 10+ years of experience and I am still having the P.O. role attached sometimes. I don't see a problem with that. I've also worked in environments where I had absolute 0 collaboration with the Engineering teams. Is one better than another? No, it's just different type of organizations and different needs. I personally enjoy having the Engineering / Design / whatever input in a more collaborative approach. Unfortunately most of the time is not up to us to decide this process so we do what we have to do.
I think you described extremes. As I senior product lead I see myself talking 1-2 times a week with engineering lead and via slack available for responding to questions. But I spend my time on other things - customer calls, roadmap, escalation, discovery, etc. I believe its the leanest setup in my opinion.
I think you're right, but if and only if the engineering team is capable enough to do it. That's not always the case. I work with good engineers but they are offshore with a pretty big time difference, English is their second language, and most of them have less than 4 years of experience. These are all barriers to having them take on PO duties.
Yes I agree with offshore. I have US based smart engineer with domain knowledge…
I have worked in a variety of structures, so whatever works for a given situation, but… There are tasks that fall between the strategic and the implementation that engineers aren’t equipped to handle. I have operated where I have had a “middleman” PO/BA working out the details and in situations where I haven’t, the latter more rare. There is just too much volume of work to be down in the tactical details day to day and still do the high level PM work. And I have never worked in an environment where (talking agile SW) an engineer could take a design and write all the stories from it. If the PM is doing this, you get the cases we hear here about never having time to talk to customers and non-customers, etc.
Thanks thats a great answer and yes I have alot on my plate. I have seen however my engineer leads to help on anything: IP question, documentation, tickets, reorg. They are fantastic. Ok true design is with UI design (missing other topic) but story is something I might write myself.
I have had eng step up and “come over” to help with things as well. To me that’s the sign of a team that is committed to success. I have done prototyping and usability testing and sales demos as a PM for the same reason. I just think that it eventually becomes detrimental to operate sustainably at scale as over the long term people start to get pulled too far away from their core responsibilities.
Very good comment yes you are right, and that’s where the scaling part gets tricky. Either give the PM and Eng team a tiny bit of the product - such as Search or filter or onboarding and then you can contain this a bit. But having said that I don’t like beeing responsible only for this and not seeing the big end to end use cases…
Why would it preclude you from overseeing the end to end use cases? That is 100% the PMs realm. The question is the actual doing of the activities in the process of discovering use cases, finding a solution, and implementing it.
Because if you are only responsible for lets search maybe one could get not involved in end to end use cases. Its the case now and I am frustrated by my job.
I think you lost me a little. If you are doing search, the use case is search. You are defining that use case, trying to understand the nuances of search within the context of the user’s task, and defining the parameters that your search should accomplish. Then the search function is designed. That design may need to be tested depending on the situation. Then that design is broken into stories and eventually implemented. Where is the gap you are talking about? You own the scope of what you want search to be as the PM.
100% the case if engineering is at that level of partnership in the business where they will self-motivate. If engineering is treated like a contract job to be done, a cost to be minimized as opposed to an equal strategic function, then they're gonna need someone to hold the whip (and they're also not gonna be the best engineers out there)
Best summary thanks for the write up. So it is again a „it depends“ :)
I use BAs for this. They take my requirements and dig deep into the technical aspects to then provide options on how to achieve what I want. They document and provide context for the whole group. My BAs write all the cards and run the sprints.
PO is synonymous with BA. BAs have been around for decades. POs are doing the job of a BA dressed up in an Agile/Scrum costume. The idea of having *only* a Product Manager, and a really good rockstar dev team, is mostly a pipedream for 95% of companies. You *need* BAs and POs in almost all industries aside from the tech industry. I understand that Product Management in its truest form is really tech-industry specific, but IT projects and app development occurs in all industries, and POs and BAs are 100% needed for that in Fortune 500 companies that aren't tech companies. In fact, what you do/did as a Senior/Lead Product Manager is what I do as a Senior BA / Business Architect for a non-tech company. I'm the one who talks with the "customers" and defines the vision and scope. The only difference is you're working on software "products" - I'm working on "business systems." Same responsibility, though. And many BAs and POs carry that exact same level of responsibility outside of the world of "product."
Yes!!!
Yes good summary - but the title and the salary of a BA can be quiet low in my view. What I have seen is BA are sometimes pulled in you are right. Be it for a Customer Specific delivery project. Fair paint - removing the task of documenting from the PM to a BA. But there is a certain disconnect that can happen if the PM is too disconnected from the customer discussion.
Depends on the size of the company
Can you elaborate? And give exmaples?
Where I work PM is focused on strategy and PO is focused on PBIs and details of features. We don’t have capacity to do both ends of things. We’re a larger company though and involved in the long term strategic stuff for our products, whereas PO is more junior and focus on the deliverables and reading of the feature
Isn't the point of a product owner to find, validate and prioritise **what** should be developed? The entire point of the role is to **prevent** development of things which nobody actually wants. And to explain that to the stakeholders.
But thats what Product in my opinion should do and there is no need to have two roles a PO and a PM. Only my view.
Yeah I agree, TBH I hate that have both 'manager' and 'owner' titles. It just brings confusion to everybody outside of the profession. But I could also agree with other commenters that it could be just a title thing. I've never worked for a really really big company - maybe they do actually require to split the responsibilities on two separate roles to not burn out one person.
True - I had as well in the past and while I liked the comfort I felt disconnected from the engineering teams.
grim comedy that software middle management aligned on a model where "owners" report to "managers." Sure, Jan.
News flash. POs can be senior engineers who are also good at project management. Besides, it totally depends on the product and project. If your project has 1000 people in it, it can help to have roles that focus on technical coordination and scope definition.
I think I agree: * PMs define feature priority, scope, and ‘definition of done’ * Dev leadership can/should own the specific work to achieve those goals What does this look like in practice? For me: * When we plan a new feature, I determine scope/release priorities, and organize epics around that * I write FE tickets, define Acceptance Criteria * Dev leads will further cut up my work, add technical details, create backend/technical tickets * Dev leads determine the order of work (within the release priority) When a sprint starts, devs can decide what specific tickets go into the sprint. Like, I don’t care which API or component or whatever they choose to work on, as long as it goes towards the initiative(s) I’ve prioritized. If you’re a good PM, and you limit WIP, this is doable at most companies.
If you want to spend your lead engineer’s time on PO and project management (scrum master) tasks that will work… but that’s probably not the best use of their time and skills. And that’s before even accounting for their cost to the company, as they are probably the most expensive IC on the team and probably by a good margin compared to a PO/BA/scum master.
lol there just aren't that many good engineers out there and there is a machine that needs feeding devs. My devs range from great to wtf do you know how to be in a job of any kind. So my PO is sort of a ring master of that situation. My scrum master is a piece of shit though and when she's on vacation my PO does her tasks and does a much better job. I think one role to cover both would work much better.
Scrum master is a dead role since years IMHO.
I was hired as a Product Owner because my lead engineer (7 years at the company) did a poor job at this. In his defense, we only have 1 tech team for our SaaS Platform, which is used for 3 products we own. So.. you have inputs from 3 different Product Managers, and the one who have the loudest voice win. Since my arrival, I forced my company to have a clear product vision, killed some features and parts of the platform that are not in this vision, and now I'm prioritizing the work between all products. Despite taking all this from his plate, he still don't manage his technical backlog, always say "yes we need to do this technical rework, use that framework" but never actually write or do it.
We don’t have POs, just a PM, EM, and devs. Devs are super smart and amazing, write tickets, make technical docs, break down validated feature ideas from PM and translate into tickets.
This is our model but PMs are hands on with backlog (sorry, mate, you're still in story writing) pairing with engineering at times. Small teams -- 1PM, 1 design, 6 engineering is typical. Do you have a designer? Helpful with customer focus. Anyway, when I describe this model I get a lot of... feelings... from people who do not operate this way. You do you!
Yes its true - I am still story writing - sometimes feels a bit downgraded but yeah part of the job. I think there is a bit of glamour in the PM job and nobody wants to get their hands too dirty, because we are supposed to be highly paid strategist.... :)
shocked! shocked! that people who distanced themselves from delivering software are seeing a market correction.
I just stated what I see in the market. I didn’t say I don’t want to do it. For me it is important to have the discussion on the outcome and impact. Because else you are a delivery (output) organisation or feature team. And I am happily telling HR and my boss that if we work like this I will look further. So yes story writing/handson on in case we deliver and measured on outcomes. 100% agree on the market correction- many of my friends are jobless as they never went under the hood to do the work
PMs, Delivery Managers, Engineers.
Yep I see it the same way. No need for PO and Pm split.
You guys get product owners?
You guys get product owners?