[cjglo]

Also a former Cap1 employee here, the 3 people managing a team of 3 engineers is quite common.

My last team before leaving had 3 engineers: tech lead, me, and a junior dev. It had 4 non-engineers managing us: a product owner, a head Agile Delivery Lead, a more junior agile Delivery Lead, and our manager.

[feanaro]

It doesn't sound to me like the product owner should be considered the developers' manager. Though I guess that depends on what the word "manage" means and these days it's starting to sound like it's lost all meaning.

[oasisbob]

Strong product owners controlling the workflow and prioritization of the team certainly feel like management when you're working under one.

[SpicyLemonZest]

What makes it a hard call is that, in an organization that's trying to be engineering-focused, the product owner typically has as much say in what work you'll be doing as the person the org chart says you report to. (They have the most relevant expertise - a "people manager" has to spend a lot of their time managing people, while the product owner's sole and full-time responsibility is understanding what work the product needs.)

[MisterBastahrd]

They shouldn't. Otherwise, there's nobody to pushback against stupid client requests. Product owners should be managing the product, not the employees. Having an employee manager to butt heads leads to a better overall product because it leads to better discussion between the devs who know the system and the product owner who is helping to flesh out requirements.

[spritefs]

What did the agile people do?]

[AeroNotix]

Promote synergy, direct workflow, bring value to key stakeholders

[krona]

> bring value to key stakeholders

Or not, in this case.

[ushakov]

So, nothing?

[jpatt]

Eh, steel manning the role it kind of just sounds like a TPM. When roles are crisply defined, a good TPM has been a life changer for my job satisfaction. You basically get permission to farm out a lot of the most annoying parts of the job--status update forums, timeline management, and dependency wrangling--to another person who does it full time.

[spritefs]

Afaik all my tpm does is create outlook events and occasionally come to our standup to bitch about how we aren't doing enough jira

[belligeront]

I've seen both versions of these. A good TPM is extremely valuable though, especially for work that is highly reliant on coordinating other teams. The bad version was a net negative to team productivity.

[shamiln]

A reflection of your TPM, I guess

[nkozyra]

See who could complain about this it sounds incredibly valuable.

[cinntaile]

They're getting axed while the engineers get to stay, so not much it seems.

[__derek__]

My first SDE job was in a company with a dedicated Scrum Master role, and they were basically the lubricant to make Agile/Scrum teams fit into what was essentially a waterfall environment. It's roughly a TPM in Big Tech, but without those companies as industry peers for setting comp.

[spritefs]

Weird that some companies have a dedicated role for that. My current gig doesn't talk about agile at all... we still have two week sprints and self directing teams and all of that, just none of the annoying buzzwords

[__derek__]

That's as it should be. As soon as people start with the buzzwords, I tune out.

[servercobra]

You need that many people to properly manage Jira /s

[richiezc]

something something conjoined triangles of success