Lenny's PodcastMelissa Perri: Why SAFe quietly fails real product teams
Through scaled agile frameworks built for developers, SAFe drifts; product owners ripping it up grow into product managers focused on real customer impact.
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Why SAFe Fails Product Teams And How Product Owners Can Evolve
- Melissa Perri explains how the ‘product owner’ role emerged from Scrum and Agile as a narrow, developer-facing function, distinct from end-to-end product management. She argues that frameworks like SAFe and Scrum-by-the-book over-emphasize process and certification while under-investing in discovery, product strategy, and real customer value. Large non–software-native enterprises adopt SAFe because it looks like a plug-and-play operating model, but often end up with bloated ceremonies, order-taking product owners, and little real accountability for outcomes. Perri outlines how leaders can redesign operating models and career paths, and how individual product owners can grow into true product managers focused on strategy, customers, and measurable impact.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasThe product owner role was never designed as full product management.
In early Scrum, the product owner existed to prioritize work for developers, not to own market research, experimentation, and strategy. Many enterprises mistakenly treat it as synonymous with product management, leaving huge gaps in discovery and decision-making.
SAFe solves coordination and release trains, but not product strategy.
SAFe gives executives a comforting, highly prescriptive map for organizing many teams, but it largely ignores how to do customer discovery, set product strategy, or connect roadmaps to business outcomes—so companies end up shipping a lot without knowing if it matters.
Rigid, process-first Agile often crowds out customer-centric work.
When teams sprint back-to-back, fill backlogs for the sake of utilization, and sit in endless ceremonies, product people have no time to talk to customers or measure impact, turning Agile into ‘work about work’ rather than a way to deliver value faster.
Great product organizations invest in clear roles, paths, and leaders.
Successful transformations pair internal talent with experienced product leaders, define true product management responsibilities up and down the org, and ensure product managers have access to customers, data, and decision rights—not just a new title.
Product owners can and should behave like product managers.
If you’re a product owner, you can push to understand goals, join customer research, frame work in terms of problems and outcomes, and ask what success looks like—then reflect that impact on your resume to move into more strategic PM roles.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThis product owner role did not emerge from product management as we know it today. It was a way to help the developers prioritize what to work on.
— Melissa Perri
I do not recommend using SAFe. Every single person I have talked to who likes SAFe, found success with SAFe, they ended up ripping it up and making it into something else.
— Melissa Perri
Take Scrum away—you still need product management. Product owner doesn’t exist without Scrum.
— Melissa Perri
We’re talking about work about work, but we’re not actually getting into: what are we achieving here?
— Melissa Perri
There’s no fast track. We don’t get to just skip over all the hard things.
— Melissa Perri
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