In our region, management has begun to tout how HPOM has been incredibly helpful and boosted efficiency, yet they haven't provided any data or examples to back it up. There's a narrative surrounding HPOM that suggests SAP has too many product owners and product managers. This idea seems to come straight from the McKinsey playbook, and I find it disappointing. Product Owners in our region are anxious and fear they might be laid off. Development Managers are urging teams to draft product documents and user stories using Joule AI. Personally, I don't believe Joule is ready to take over the role of product managers, but most development managers think otherwise. What's the situation like in your area? I assumed they would hold off for at least a year or two before promoting such a narrative, but they haven't. It appears that HPOM was established solely to let go of product managers and replace them with Joule.
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This is fake news. There are over 50 product managers jobs on the SAP Careers page and twice as many through the internal portal. HPOM was supposed to make product management at SAP more efficient. Mohd Alam has clarified several times that this is not an optimization or cost cutting exercise. It's more of a cultural change.
These are all real answers unfortunately.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to money.
SAP will fire a lot of people immigrants included. Immigrants will get remigrated and the far right will win the next election (they're already leading in polls). When SAP needs anything done, they will use American AI or cheap Indian labor. How do we know that?
This is exactly the message that Christian Klein and Dominik Asam push all the time.
This is bad. But I don't think we can fight this anymore.
CK and DA have a lot of support within SAP from executives who look up to them as saviors. They have a lot of external support from Thiel and other such people. Germany is turning far right and in the next election, we'll probably be the same as the US. Because the hatred towards immigrants is so high that a majority of the population here will vote against their interests as long as non-white people are hurt. The only winners are the executive board that will take millions in bonuses and leave. And the executives and many many long-term SAP employees who do not work but also refuse to leave.
I don't see any good solution here.
The ones looking after my industry are completely rubbish. They push their own objectives to the detriment of my partners and their customers. Life would be better without them.
@bh Especially the women in tech hires right? I dealt with a bunch of female PMs and more than half the time it was spent managing their negative gossip and behaviors against other female colleagues. And making sure they're getting their work done (most cases they are not). They all got laid off anyways but the leftover PMs aren't any better due to brain drain.
@ek Layoff immigrants and then rehire them in India because their currency is cheap. How will remigration fix the fact that western labour is expensive and replaceable in a low cost location? The EU just signed an infinite immigration pact with Modi. RIP.
Everyone is getting replaced with American AI.
Might as well make your peace with that.
@bh Agreed. We should fire as many product managers as possible. And use the money saved to fund share buybacks and executive bonuses. While we're at it, let us also invest more in important roles such as HR.
Rent A Human is the future of work. Bow to your silicon overlords
Most of PMs are useless anyway. So that might be an improvement.
That is why there is also huge investment in design. They are creating a design language that works with Joule. Joule Studio will allow development managers to create SAP apps complete with AI agents. External technical consultants and small development teams will be used for testing and release. In the future, you only need development managers and very small teams at SAP. All other roles are deemed irrelevant because they are being replaced with AI agents. And SAP has partnered with KPMG to make Joule Studio available to more non-SAP systems.
So don't for a moment think that only product managers are unsafe. They want to eventually replace most jobs with AI. And AI being so bad at replacing humans won't stop them. They just want the share price to go up so executives can get higher bonuses.