[greatgib]

All of that to transform developers and "software engineers" into stupid micro-managed monkeys, just good to write code.

The worse is the product owner. Sadly the management world did profite of the hype of scrum to add this bullshit job but just a reminder:. It goes against the original concepts of Agile!

In the original Agile the product owner is the customer, and the goal was to have the devs in direct contact with the customer. It is not supposed to be an employee, with some management level, that tell you what and in which orders things have to be done, because he or she knows better...

Now, the devs are more than even isolated from the customer by bullshit jobs in between. This is very sad...

[axlee]

I personnally appreciate someone making the rounds around all the stakeholders, booking meetings for me, finding who do I need to talk to to get a domain-specific answer, reporting to stakeholders on the progress, and more generally navigating the organization on my behalf. This stuff is just too time consuming to tackle on top of a development role, especially in a larger org.

note: we are a product organization, not consultants.

[catmanjan]

I suspect customer as product owner works really well for consulting, imagine all the billable hours

[gowld]

Only if customer is someone like a government who doesn't care about getting a result.

If the customer cares, letting them flail and fail is recipe for heartbreak, unpaid bills, and lawsuits.

[dangrover]

This was what I thought when I was an angsty engineer in early 20's, and I guess what motivated me to become a PM, where I realized it wasn't true.

Doing the PM job well -- being rigorous about the product, its goals, its strategy, customers, how it interfaces with the external world, and figuring out how to distill that down internally to empower your team -- takes as much intellectual horsepower as engineering. I had to stop writing code every day to realize how deeply complex and interesting the non-code world can actually be. A good example is the passage in "Superpumped" about how Travis Kalanik validated the idea for Uber with deep research. It's not just bullshitting through meetings.

I think the issue though is that, unlike eng, there is no obvious intellectual "floor" for PMs (equivalent of fizzbuzz for programming), so you've probably dealt with lots of bad, lazy, incapable ones.

[satyrnein]

Usually when I hear this sentiment from a developer, it's not because the developer has a burning desire to run customer surveys, analyze top support requests, document byzantine business process, sit in 100 meetings, etc, themselves. It's because the imagined alternative is that the developer just does whatever they feel like, which is not the reality.

[detaro]

I don't agree that PO is a necessarily "bullshit job", because "the customer" is often a complex group with demands that need to be unified and prioritized. So there needs to be a standin for the that group in the dev team - that's the PO. As dev, I much rather have that be one person than a "comittee" of all the different customer aspects.

[johnx123-up]

Also, if I'm right, even in current Agile definitions, Product Manager is a customer facing role (Unlike the article comparison chart reads)