I keep hearing the product owner role will eventually be eliminated similar to the back accords USAA. Any truth to that?
10 replies (most recent on top)
When it comes to Agile/Safe professionals, in normal times I would join the pro-layoff comments like some I see here. but right now the job market is noticeably more difficult and I'd feel bad if they were all out looking for work right now. It's really wonderful that there exists a middle class career path for running a daily standup and making sure the team is updating things in Jira correctly.
I left before one year was up and paid back my sign on bonus because I had a technical background and the management team put non technical PDPO and a DPO on a technical project and brought it to its knees. Incompentency was rewarded meanwhile I was dismissed.
If you get rid of DPOs, the work will never get done. IT wonders off building “nice to haves” while waiting on emails for updates on impediments for work with value.
USAA loves to create endless processes for everything that provide little to no value and then have shocked pikachu face when it takes forever and costs a ton of money to deliver anything.
My guess is that more roles like SM and DPO will be eliminated or scaled down. It’ll look good for cost cutting until they realize devs are doing that work and are becoming less efficient. Then some new exec will come in reintroducing the role with a fancy new name.
I have a great SM now. Prior 3 were terrible. The real roles they should dump are RTE and Agile Coach. Never seen value from either.
Scrum masters are paid well, but nowhere near what developers are paid. For a technical person to stop that career trajectory to become a SM would be a long shot. Plus, it’s a bunch of pointless meetings and having to put up with d-mb executives wanting to take the agile tools and turn them into their personal excel spreadsheets.
This may be different for less corporate environments, like startups. But I’ve always worked in the Fortune 500 world and the SM is so bombarded with corporate cr-p that they can’t develop into what the role really encompasses.
Scrum masters main value to a dev team is their connections in the company. How best to remove roadblocks when the team is stuck. Oddly enough, my SM at USAA was a bulldog and that’s what was needed.
IDK what purpose DPOs are expected to serve except checking boxes in Jira. Now I have worked with a few DPOs. One or two have been solid contributors to product dev't while others have been utterly useless. But USAA IT has a bigger problem: no translational layer between the business owners and IT implementation. There should be a layer of business analysts/technical analysts between business owners and implementation ppl to do things like hash out how long it'll take to do something AFTER analysis on what it'll take to do it is done. As it is now, estimates are all shoot from the hip and often wrong, sometimes dramatically so. But w/ the wave of cutting staff being how it is, I doubt USAA will be hiring analysts any time soon. Thus IT work gets done too often incorrectly or incompletely.
I can't wait for them to get rid of all the scrum masters with no technical experience. USAA has scrum masters who last job was literally cleaning toilets.
I heard they are eliminating scrum masters next round
I can't confirm or deny this. But, what I can do is hope that role is eliminated. In reality, Product Owners provide little or no value to any given Agile team. Product Owners are just another sparkling piece of Agile bureaucracy that USAA doesn't need. Like all these Agile process jobs, such as Release Train Engineers, these positions are staffed by clueless people who have never written a line of code. They wouldn't know what source code was if it came up and bit them in the @ss.
But it's all SAFe right!