PO as a job title, never again

5 min readMar 6, 2023

Agility, widespread by the Scrum framework, is here for about 20y now and there is still Product Owner demand on the market.

Some reminders:

The Product Owner role is to maximize business value delivered to the customer

For a company, “business” is directly related to the money earned from the customer [1]. The role is not to know well a business area to effectively articulate requirements, nor about optimizing an already existing customer path, nor about software quality.

Product Owner is a role in the Scrum framework, not a fully-fledged job

The role describes responsibilities and tasks relative to the delivery part of the Product Manager job, assuming that Product Management is a lot bigger than Scrum [2].

A Product Owner without business initiative is not a Product Owner

The Product Owner is not only responsible for cost, time and quality, but his primary responsibility is to earn money for his company, which only makes sense with business initiative. Such limited responsibilities are not in compliance with the method, if not led to evolve [3].

In no way did I envision the Product Owner becoming a business analyst that was responsible for requirements engineering.
Ken Schwaber, Scrum co-creator

The Product Owner role has been defined by Scrum

The role has also been copied by other frameworks, SAFe in particular, which uses Scrum terminology (ScrumXP, Scrum Master, Product Owner, etc.) while reducing the PO responsibility to what Scrum calls a Proxy Product Owner [4].

Each PO represents the needs of customers and the business within a particular Solution domain, which is typically co-represented by a Product Manager.
The Product Owner role with SAFe

A Product Owner limited to its Proxy part is not coherent with Scrum, if not led to evolve [5].

=> Product Owner or Proxy Product Owner jobs are not consistent

Effects of this irregularity

Having job names in disagreement with the responsibilities actually given or hijacked from their original purpose, alters the competition on the Product Manager job market in different ways:

devalues the expertise and training of Product Management professionals
twists the real size of the market
is a form of discriminatory treatment and abuse of professionals respecting these standards (often between economically powerful players, end customers and service companies, and individuals, employees or freelancers)

More generally,

restrains the digital and agile transition of companies, innovation
slows down the rise in expertise of service companies on value-added services
puts professionals in difficulty, especially freelancers who pay for the training effort to support their expertise

The antithesis of current movements

Scrum is often associated with the motivation theory from Daniel Pink, which promotes autonomy, mastery and purpose [6].

purpose: lie on entry, not respected contracts, ongoing conflict, misalignment with company goals
mastery: from a role with business initiative to a role of simple execution: false ownership, training not properly exploited: dilution of skills, habit of working poorly in a situation of continuous conflict
autonomy: how in this context? if not in job turnover

By way of small arrangements, instead of agility, we find ourselves with a form of perverse traditional management which leads more to a situation of demotivation.

By extension, some other movements to correlate

the Z-generation (digital native characteristic) and its values: quest for meaning, surpassing, individualism, sociability
the progress of technologies, faster and faster, and so the explosion of professions and expertise (and the shortage of talent), the values of expertise of this digital population: truth, competence, independence
new company trends: strong emphasis on happiness at work and co-design (which is advancing faster than product empowerment).

to lead to antinomic situations where we

do not do the job for which we signed, which possibly does not exist
must pretend to be happy at work
lead co-design workshops and bring our product expertise (not recognized as business expertise) to the real holders of the business initiative so that they can discuss the initiatives to be engaged (situations where the PO and the PM are separate or PM limited to one subordinate role)
participate in fun team-building workshops where the final impression is more of being infantilized for the benefit of a perverse traditional management than aligned with the company’s business objectives

Anecdote, I recently left a Head of mobile substitution for LVMH, led by the french world first fortune Bernard Arnault (still struggling with Elon Musk).
The content of the contract was not only, not compliant with Scrum on each line of the description, but even not respected in its course.

The time to act

I think it is time to change this state, identify those responsible and their faults, and take action:

service companies for not assuming their role of expertise and advice
end customers
— to make not frank choices about their digital and agile transformation
— to say that product expertise is technological expertise instead of business expertise, and that it is the business of externals to whom we discard (and who must continually sell it to us). Who said bottom-up and top-down?

What actions can we take to change that ?

Justice:
we can alert competition authorities on the basis of an alteration of the market of the Product Manager jobs.
Group action:
we can co-write an explaining text validated by experts, then organize a petition among every product professionals, up-to-date service companies and end customers to correct the error where it appears
— on the market (professional branches, companies, job platforms)
— on the web (government website, training organization, magazines)
At our level
— prefer a PM to a PO job (not always easy as there are many of this kind)
— an easy rule of thumb for job description: do you feel empowered on business topics or seated in a subordinate role? Are you seen as tactical or strategic?

For my part, I decided to not take any more PO jobs… it led me to go back temporarily to a developer role.

I have also started a recourse against the service company that connected me to LVMH (recourse against the end of the contract, litigious too, not for the mission object inconsistency to my regret).

Finally, for 100€ with a lawyer, I denounced to authorities the fact to use Product Owner for job titles as a false advertising (not so expensive when you are a freelancer to attack these intermediaries who are supposed to bring their expertise to the market).