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Melissa 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.

Lenny RachitskyhostMelissa PerriguestKristina (OneSchema)guest
Nov 10, 20241h 24mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:12

    Melissa’s background

    1. LR

      There's this whole concept of SAFe, basically scaled Agile, right?

    2. MP

      So, scaled Agile framework came out of the desire to figure out how do we scale Scrum and different processes. 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.

    3. LR

      You've been up close and personal with a lot of companies working with product owners, scaled Agile, and all these things.

    4. MP

      This 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. I ended up going to a ton of Agile conferences and speaking about product management, and I started to learn that there was this product owner role in Scrum.

    5. LR

      It feels like it's growing. Like, more and more companies are adopting this as the way to work.

    6. MP

      A lot of large companies turn to Scrum or to the frameworks, and it's because they traditionally didn't grow up building software. When you look at Agile methodologies, what we're really saying there is we want to be able to move quickly and deliver great value to- to customers. If you embrace those principles, you're gonna do well.

    7. LR

      (instrumental music) Today, my guest is Melissa Perri. Melissa is a legend in the product management community. She's the author of the foundational book, Escaping the Build Trap, and her most recent book, Product Operations. She's also the CEO and founder of The Product Institute, which trains product managers at all levels. She's trained PMs at almost every Fortune 500 company at this point. And in our conversation, we dive deep into a topic that I don't spend a lot of time on on this podcast; product owners, Scrum, scaled Agile, and building product at very large non-tech companies. Melissa shares the history behind these ways of working, what she's seen work and not work when companies roll out these frameworks, and most importantly, what you can do as a leader at one of these companies and as a product owner working in one of these companies to level up your organization and yourself. I learned a ton from this conversation, and I'm really curious to hear what you think since we don't cover this kind of stuff on this podcast too much. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Melissa

  2. 2:12 – 6:37

    The rise of the product owner role

    1. LR

      Perri. Melissa, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

    2. MP

      Thanks, Lenny. Thanks for having me.

    3. LR

      First, let me give a little context on this conversation that we're having. I think it's gonna be a little bit unique. So, I was doing a deep dive on the job market in tech, and I saw something that was really surprising to me, that the product owner role was the third-fastest growing role in tech. And this was just in the US, the data I was looking at, but I think it's probably true broadly. And this was extremely surprising to me because I've never worked with a product owner. I've never... Uh, I don't hear anyone in my circles talking about product owners. I've never wanted to hire a product owner. And it feels like it's just kind of this very different part of the tech ecosystem that you don't hear a lot about on podcasts like this, and it's clearly growing. So, I felt like it'd be really helpful to spend some time helping people and helping me understand this part of the world. And so I asked you to come on to talk about this. You've been up close and personal with a lot of companies working with this way of working with product owners, scaled Agile, and all these things. And so I couldn't think of a better person to have on here to help us understand what's happening here and also just to help people do this better. So, Melissa, thank you again for coming on and- and helping us understand this.

    4. MP

      Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. I have been really passionate about this topic (laughs) for- for many years, and I- I've been talking about it in both Agile circles and product management circles. So, pretty excited for the listeners to hear what else is going on out there.

    5. LR

      (instrumental music) This episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application. Tired of bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's really happening inside your product? With all the tools you need in one simple-to-use platform, Pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product and then turn those insights into action all so you can get your users to do what you actually want them to do. First, Pendo is built around product analytics, seeing what your users are actually doing in your apps so that you can optimize their experience. Next, Pendo lets you deploy in-app guides that lead users through the actions that matter most. Then Pendo integrates user feedback so that you can capture and analyze what people actually want. And the new thing in Pendo, session replays, a very cool way to visualize user sessions. I am not surprised at all that over 10,000 companies use it today. Visit pendo.io/lenny to create your free Pendo account today and start building better experiences across every corner of your product. P.S. You want to take your product-led knowhow a step further? Check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses led by top product experts and designed to help you grow and advance in your career. Learn more and experience the power of the Pendo platform today at pendo.io/lenny. Pendo. I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.

    6. K(

      Yes, thank you for having me on, Lenny.

    7. LR

      What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Skayle, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

    8. K(

      Yes. So, we just launched OneSchema File Feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all.

    9. LR

      I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like OneSchema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever?

    10. K(

      Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We are laser-focused on integration reliability to help teams end all those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.

    11. LR

      I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Kristina, thank you for joining us and if you want to learn more, head on over to OneSchema.co. That's OneSchema.co.

  3. 6:37 – 8:27

    Understanding Agile and Scrum

    1. LR

      So before we get into the history, is there just anything broadly that you think might be helpful to share before we dive into, like, the history of the product owner role and all these things?

    2. MP

      Maybe it'll help to set some context of, you know, where, where did I see all of this start emerging as well. When I started in tech, I was very much a product manager. Never heard of the product owner role before in my life. And in Escaping the Build Trap, I talk a lot about how we use SCRUM when I started working with this team in a startup, and it was the first time I ever heard of it. That was, like, 2011. And at the time, the person who was teaching me about Agile was very, like, "Hey, this is, this is flexible. We're just gonna break things into sprints. We're going to, um, sit there and actually talk about the work, right? This is made for us to actually get better at our jobs." So we were pretty sold on it, and it was never dogmatic. And as I worked at other companies, I found that they were being a little more dogmatic with their SCRUM, with their stand-ups, how we actually run things. And then, uh, I started speaking at conferences, and one of the first conferences I spoke at in New York City was called Lean UX. And there was a bunch of people from the Agile world there too. So I learned that this was much bigger than, you know, what we were learning in my company and what we were doing in these companies. There's this whole group of people out there practicing Agile. And I was like, "Oh, this is cool. I wanna learn how to do things better, so, like, teach me about your philosophies." And I ended up going to a ton of Agile conferences and speaking about product management, and at the time, people were really excited to hear more about it. And I started to learn that there was this product owner role in SCRUM where I was talking more about how we traditionally talk about product management, like understand your customer, go out test things, make sure there's a hypothesis, don't just blindly build what you wanna build. And I found out that that was not the case in a lot of these companies who were adopting SCRUM and introducing a product owner role.

  4. 8:27 – 10:41

    Challenges in Agile transformations

    1. MP

      So I started doing a lot of trainings, um, through my school, Product Institute, and I'd get called into these large companies, like, all these large banks, um, probably around 2014, 2015, to help them learn product management. And I was really excited about this, because before, they didn't want anything to do with it. They were like, "I don't know what product management is. I don't need this." So I go in to train people, and I found that a lot of them had been going through an Agile transformation, and they had all of these new product owners, where they came in and they basically said, "Hey," like, "You're a product owner now. Your whole role has changed." And they came from all different backgrounds. Some were developers. So a lot were businesspeople who worked on the banking side. A lot were business analysts. Some were project managers. But they just collectively took a bunch of people and said, "Ta-da! Today you get to be a product owner 'cause we're gonna do Agile now." And I would come in and help train these people, and what I found was that there was a really big misconception about what those people should be doing compared to what they teach in Agile and SCRUM versus what we all consider great product management. So I've been trying to fill that gap for the last, you know, almost 10 years working with these companies here. And then I would go to their leaders, and at the beginning of these Agile transformations, I'd be like, "You know, you can't just do SCRUM. That's not going to make you amazing at delivering products. There's so much more to this." And the leaders didn't quite understand that, and I'm noticing this really big shift in the industry where we're finally getting there. A lot of companies are doing it well now. Capital One is a great example that took their Agile transformation and started adding product management on it, and they, they've really turned that around in the card business. But so many organizations are still at the beginning of this journey, and they're at the place where I saw people 10 years ago. So I think there's still a lot of companies out there, maybe we take it for granted in tech or in Silicon Valley about how many (laughs) companies are doing this and how big the scope is, where they're making these roles, but they're not really doing product management end-to-end. So that's kind of where I've seen all of these areas, and I've been trying to help organizations for the last, you know, 10 years really set up robust product management practices, so it's not just one piece of development. It's how do we actually build better products?

  5. 10:41 – 13:58

    The history of the product owner role

    1. MP

    2. LR

      I love this example. Capital One is just like, it can work really well, yeah-

    3. MP

      Mm-hmm.

    4. LR

      ... and you can get to a place where it's actually really productive. So there's a few ways we can go about this. Do you think it would be helpful to g- talk through the, the history of the product owner role, just like where it initially emerged?

    5. MP

      Yeah.

    6. LR

      Okay, cool.

    7. MP

      I think that's a great place to start.

    8. LR

      So let's go there.

    9. MP

      I think it brings a lot of context to, to what's happening, uh, and, and people forget about the history here. So when I explain it to people, I say, you know, "We had product managers in Silicon Valley, right? They were in Google. They were in all of these companies, Amazon, and they were born out of this business role." And from a software native company, your software is the business, right? It's what you sell. It's what you actually look at. So our product managers in Silicon Valley are doing, you know, m- they're doing market research. They're talking to customers. They're working with developers. They're iterating. They're doing the end-to-end product management. But what happened on the other side of things, especially in large companies, is the emergence of product management from SCRUM, from product ownership, and that's usually the first time these companies were introduced to product management was from implementing a product owner role and then going, "Hey, we're still not meeting our goals. Like, we're still not... Are we building the right thing?" And then they start thinking about product management. And where that role came from is, uh, SCRUM. So if we go back and talk about the history of Agile, Agile was a movement that got started by software developers. So in 2001, the Agile Manifesto was written.A bunch of developers got together in Park City, Utah. Uh, they were all skiing together, and they said, "Hey, we've been independently all working on how to develop software better." Some people were d- practicing Scrum, as we know it today. That was Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland. There were people who were doing, uh, different types of Agile frameworks as well, Kanban, where you were, you know, moving it through a Kanban board. Uh, there was, uh, behavioral driven development. There was feature driven development. That was a style of Agile. There was, um, XP, extreme programming, that was started by Ron Jeffries. All of these people kinda found each other saying, "Hey, we've been trying to push the boundaries of how do we develop better software," and they got together and they wrote the Agile Manifesto, as we know it today. So the Agile Manifesto is really just a guideline on how they're striving to not just be, you know, people who code what people want, but like building better products. How do we build better products through software development? The premise to remember this is, and I keep saying it, but they're all software developers. Nobody was a product manager who went to that meeting, right? Nobody who wrote the Agile Manifesto was actually a product manager. And I've spent a long time talking to these people as well over the past 10 years, just saying, "Hey, how did this come about?" Right? "Where did this come from?" The one person who was really close to them who was a product manager was Jeff Patton, but he never signed the Agile Manifesto. He wasn't at that meeting. So, he talked to them a lot. He was able to see what was going on, but all this was approached from a, "How do we build better products from a development perspective?" So that's really important to know. Two of the people who signed the Agile Manifesto, Jeff and Ken, as I was talking about, they were independently kind of coming up with Scrum on their own in their different companies, and they got together and started to codify it, and they said, "This is how I'm doing it, this is how I'm doing it." And they ended up writing the Scrum

  6. 13:58 – 15:43

    The Scrum Guide

    1. MP

      Guide, and the Scrum Guide is what a lot of people base their Agile practices off of today. And in the Scrum Guide, it outlines a bunch of roles, uh, that you would do on development team, and then it says how you should be developing products. So most people out there are working in Scrum today, and what they say is, "Let's break things down into two-week sprints." You can change the length of your sprint if you want to, but two-week sprints is pretty standard. At the beginning, we define what we're gonna work on in the backlog. It's the product owner's responsibility to define what goes into the backlog, write down the user stories for it, do all that. Then the development team comes in, they discuss it, the product owner rep- prioritizes it, they ask questions, and then development team commits to what they wanna build and they go out and do it. And at the end, the result is a potentially shippable product. Not necessarily shippable, but potentially shippable. So they're trying to break it down as small chunks and build things instead of what they had been doing in a lot of companies, which was building stuff for like three years and then releasing in a big bang. And what all of the people who signed the Agile Manifesto realized was if we do it the other way, if we do a waterfall type environment, so Agile, waterfall, that's where we go across, there's a lot of risk, because we don't test it with the customer and we don't get feedback on it if we spend three years building it and never show it to somebody. So it really approached a different way of building software. So it said, "Let's chunk it down and, and try to get feedback faster." Really noble intention. In the Scrum Guide though, it introduces these new roles. So we have developers as we know and love them. We also have a product owner. Then we have a Scrum Master, and the Scrum Master is in charge in Scrum of actually helping people do Scrum better. That, that's literally their job. How do I do Scrum better? How do

  7. 15:43 – 21:01

    Product owner responsibilities

    1. MP

      I make sure that the team is working well together? So they host things like retrospectives where at the end of a sprint we say, "What went well? What didn't go well? How should we actually inspect and adapt our process?" The product owner is where things get murky. So the product owner in general first showed up with Scrum, and if you go and you read the first Scrum Guide, which I, I pulled up and started reading, because I've been very fascinated about how this is described, it says that the product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of work done. The team does the work. Interesting, because now the product owner's not quite part of the team. The team consists of developers with all the skills to turn the product owner's request into the potentially shippable increment each sprint. The team is usually seven plus, four minus two members. And then when you go further into the first version of the Scrum Guide, it does say that the Scrum Master works with the customers and management to identify and instantiate a product owner. The Scrum Master teaches the product owner how to do his or her job in order to optimize the value, uh, of the use of Scrum. If they don't, the Scrum Master is held accountable. Then it's got another tip if we go deeper into this. It says, "For commercial development, the product owner may be the product manager. For in-house development efforts, the product owner could be the user department manager." What's interesting is that that was the first version of the Scrum Guide, and I get into arguments about the Scrum Guide with people all the time. 2013's version though, the more updated one that you could go and find is the one that almost every company has run an Agile transformation off of. It loses that thing that says the product manager could be the product owner. Doesn't say it anywhere in that guide. So this was the first version and, and you could kinda tell it was like an aside. It's like, "Oh by the way, the product owner in Scrum doesn't need to be a product manager." It could be the customer, it could be a developer, it could be... It's usually the customer. But when they were writing this too, sometimes the customer was an internal person, like at a bank or somewhere where we're building software, who was asking for the software. Right? They were like, "Go build me an internal tool. Go do this." So now we're just asking for requirements inside a company and that's where you can start to see how the product owner role kind of evolved into somebody going to ask like, "Hey, what do you want me to build? What's required here?" And then just listening to somebody come back and say, "I need this feature, I need this feature, I need this, this feature." Scrum doesn't describe...... how to get the stuff into the backlog. And it didn't in the 2013 manuals. The manuals have all been a little bit better. They've all kind of been updated since then. And they do describe like it has to start with a vision a little bit more, you have to break down the vision for the product and get in there, but (laughs) none of that existed in the early versions of Scrum. So when people got trained on how to be a product owner, what was happening here is, uh, and th- this is the whole other world of Scrum over here, when people get trained to be a product owner, it's usually a two-day class where they teach them, "Hey, this is how you break down a backlog. This is how you do stand-ups with your teams. This is how you think about prioritizing work. This is how you manage your backlog, prioritize it for the developers. This is how you run the ret- you work with the retrospectives." But it doesn't teach them about experimentation. It doesn't teach them about market research. It doesn't teach them about data. It doesn't teach them about any of the things that we need to be a product manager. So then what happened was we went into this, these Agile transformations at these companies. And, uh, they said, "Hey, let's adopt Scrum," because Scrum was built as a way to build better products faster. That's literally the tagline. And (laughs) th- everybody was like, "Yeah, I wanna build products faster." Okay, great.

    2. LR

      (laughs)

    3. MP

      Like, "Let's do Scrum." And all these large organizations back in the early 2010s and the 2000s said, "Oh, we gotta be better at software. How do we do this better? 'Cause otherwise we're gonna lose when it comes to innovation." So they adopted Scrum as a way to build software faster. Now, what happened is in order to do Scrum, Scrum basically sells training. That's what Scrum does. So all of these Agile coaches would come in and teach the product owners, newly minted product owners, right? Took all those people, made 'em into product owners, put 'em through a two-day class, and then said, "Go." And that was the beginning of all the Agile transformations and that's where a lot of companies still are today. So this 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, but that was it. And the product owner was held accountable for making sure that they were working on the most, uh, pressing things or the highest value things, they do say that. But to me, if you look at it from a developer perspective, it's also the person where you can say, "Hey, well, you told me to build that."

    4. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MP

      Right? We didn't build it wrong. You told me to build that. And it almost gets into like consulting territory where you're like, "Okay, if the product owner prioritized all this stuff for me and told me what to do, I can't be held accountable if it was the wrong thing to build."

    6. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MP

      And some of that stuff does come up in a lot of teams that struggle to adopt Agile, to adopt Scrum. So I feel like there's a big misunderstanding out there about (laughs) what is this role and what should we be doing. But the, the premise of this is

  8. 21:01 – 26:21

    Adopting Scrum in organizations

    1. MP

      when we talk about Scrum is just one piece of the puzzle. And when people talk about Agile now, they almost always associate it with Scrum. I was actually Googling Agile methodologies and like I said, the other ones, Kanban's an atho- Agile methodology. XP is an Agile methodology. They don't have product owners. They, they do not exist in those methodologies. They're for developers to work on things, for teams to work on things. And XP would consider product managers in the teams as I, as far as I know it. But Scrum kind of sees it as a separate thing. So Agile methodologies, everybody says, "Oh, there's Scrum now." And so it gets a bad connotation out there about what to do with it. No one thinks Scrum, if you do it "well" is bad, but you have to understand that it's just one piece of building (laughs) great products. It's not the whole thing. And companies will adopt it like it's going to radically transform everything. And to be fair, a lot of times it's sold that way too.

    2. LR

      There's kind of like a bigger picture question that's coming to mind as you talk about this. And I'm imagining founders listening to this and smaller companies listening to this being like, "Why do we need any of this?" We're, we're just like, we're just gonna... Like especially, you know, Silicon Valley startups. "We're just gonna build stuff. We know what we're... We don't need these like frameworks. We don't need a Scrum master. Like, we just have awesome p- developers and product managers and we're just gonna build awesome stuff. And I don't know anyone that has worked this way that has built amazing things." Can you talk a bit about like who ends up looking for solutions here, like where this even comes from, what companies need help here versus like, "I just don't need any of this"?

    3. MP

      A lot of large companies turn to Scrum or to the frameworks. And it's because they traditionally didn't grow up building software. So they're looking at, "How do I implement something that has rigor at scale?" And that's where you see a lot of Scrum come up. Now, I've seen startups using Scrum. Uh, some of them do it fine, right? They understand that it's just more about trying to get things out the door every two weeks to test it with customers. And I think if you keep that philosophy, like I said, I used it, and we didn't have a lot of rigor around it. It was fine. When we were doing Scrum, when I did it with my team back in OpenSky, we got to this point where we were like, "Two weeks is too long. We're just gonna ship things every week." And we just talked to each other. We skipped stand-ups, which is like sacrilege in Scrum, but (laughs) we skipped daily stand- uh, stand-ups. We didn't need to stand around and talk about it. We talked to each other every day. For me, what was amazing and where I see teams actually thrive when they start using Scrum is when you go and talk to people, right? You're having the conversations about the work, you're breaking it down, you're understanding it, so the developers and the rest of the team can go hit the road running and people can ask important questions. If you're not doing that, that's where I think things like a framework help. But if you already are doing that, you don't need a framework, right? Like, you don't need Scrum, you don't need to be prescribed to this two-week sprint or anything like that. As long as you have a methodology or it doesn't even have to be a defined methodology. As long as you have a way of working that gets things out to customers well, who cares, right? Who actually cares? And where there's a lot of, I think, baggage in the industry and where I think... where I hear product managers get really frustrated and other people as well, developers too, is that...When you do Scrum by the book, for how people teach it and how they write about it, it's a million meetings. And I know they were put in there so that people were forced to talk. But when you already know what you're supposed to work on (laughs) , why do you need to keep doing meetings, right? Like, shouldn't you just go do some work? So, a lot of developers complain, a lot of product managers complain that Scrum has too many meetings and they don't actually get to do work, and that's where I think you have to go back to the inspect and adapt part, and a lot of people who are very religious about Scrum will come and yell at me about this. They're like, "Oh, well that's not how it's supposed to be. You're supposed to inspect and adapt." Agree, right? But a lot of people aren't doing it, and that's the piece where you go and you say, "Is this serving us? And if not, let's get rid of it," or, "Let's not do those types of things." So, when you're a small startup, I don't think you need a lot of this overhead. It's, it's really much designed for larger scale companies, and those are the ones you see really adopting it.

    4. LR

      And from what I've seen in the data, it's also companies that are, as you, I think, alluded to at the beginning, not like necessarily software first, product first companies. Like, feels like it's very common in, like, banks and telecom companies and companies that aren't, like, product first and software first.

    5. MP

      There are SaaS companies that do Scrum out there, and they like it, and I don't think they're very, uh, dogmatic about it, right?

    6. LR

      Got it. Yeah.

    7. MP

      But they, they do it for a reason of, um, just trying to provide some more context to their teams about how to work together at scale. Uh, I've also seen places where, you know, they don't prescribe whatever methodology you wanna work with for the teams, but instead, they'll spend a lot more effort breaking down, you know, the roadmaps, thinking about what are we gonna do each quarter, trying to, like, set those themes, and then they just let the teams run, and that works as well. I, I think it really depends how they adopt it, but I would say, it's not a hard and fast rule that no startups are doing this.

    8. LR

      Yeah.

    9. MP

      Some are, some are doing it. I just don't know how it's going for them (laughs) . It might, to me, it might be overkill if you're doing that with, like, a team that's pretty, pretty experienced in doing this.

    10. LR

      Yeah, and, uh, what I meant to, what I was insinuating is less just, like, Scrum as a general idea and more, like, very structured, rigid-

    11. MP

      Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

    12. LR

      ... processes, and also

  9. 26:21 – 35:20

    The origins and implementation of SAFe

    1. LR

      with product owners. And then there's this whole concept of SAFe-

    2. MP

      Yeah.

    3. LR

      ... that we can talk about. So, should we get into that? Or should we talk about, uh, product manager versus product owner and just, like, the challenges people have there?

    4. MP

      Let's, let's talk about SAFe, 'cause that's where-

    5. LR

      Okay, cool.

    6. MP

      ... a lot of this started to get confusing.

    7. LR

      Let's go there, yeah.

    8. MP

      So, Scaled Agile Framework came out of the desire to figure out how do we scale Scrum and different processes and bring it to organizations at scale? So, it originated from, um, a more structured approach to agile two, two called Rational Unified Processing. Now, SAFe wasn't the first thing that started at scale. It was, there was also LeSS, which is, um, a Scaled Agile Framework, and then Jeff Sutherland, who did Scrum, has Scrum at Scale. So, it's not the only scaling framework out there. Uh, there's a lot, there's actually a lot of out there. But SAFe was one that was marketed the best, and the way it's marketed is, will tell you everything you need to do to do all of your agile teams with Scrum and put them all together. So, the idea behind SAFe was that, uh, Dean Leffingwell came up with it. He wanted to really show how you tie multiple teams together at scale in an organization, and how do you bring some rigor and process to that? And it, the executives at really large enterprises, we're talking tens of thousands of people, right? They love SAFe because it prescribes a lot of an operating model of what to do when it comes to development. But it also gets billed as, like, hey, this is the whole model for you to go do software. And if you look at it, it's (laughs) it's a, it's a big map that everybody kind of makes fun of a little bit, and it describes, like, all, all different things on it, if you look at the map. And you can click in and you can see the definitions and you can see what's going, um, what's going on in the areas. The SAFe image has gotten bigger and bigger over time. The, I think, the, what is this? Version six, uh, and I do know a lot of people who worked on SAFe. So, I know a lot of trainers, and I've worked with companies. The first time I was introduced at, uh, to SAFe was when I, uh, was working with a bank back in 2015. I came in to train their product managers. I'm doing my training. We're, like, setting them up on how to, like, go talk to customers, talk about hypotheses, MVPs, and somebody came up to me, and they said, "Hey, Melissa. All of this is great, but I don't have time to go talk to customers, because I'm a product owner." And I was like, "Well, what are you doing on a day-to-day basis? Like, what, what don't you have time for?" "I gotta write my user stories." I'm like, "Okay. How, how many user stories do you write per day?" And this is for the developers to have a full backlog so they could all work, right? She's like, "Oh, I, yeah, I spend, like, pretty much 40 hours a day writing user stories." I'm like, "On, on what? Like, what are you, what are you controlling?" And she's like, "The log-in API for our bank." I'm like, "Can you log in?" She's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "So, so what else are you working on?" (laughs) Like, like, "Is there a new initiative? Is there a new thing?" And it's like, "No, I was reorganized into a team where I became the product owner. I have a product manager who goes and talks to customers, but then she comes and she tells me what to build, and then I write the user stories around it and I put it into the backlog for the teams." And I was like, "What is this?" Like... And then they said, "That's SAFe. This is what we're working towards." So, that's with my first experience with SAFe, and then I ran into another company that did it, another company, same thing, over and over and over again, where all these product owners were just basically trying to keep these backlog full for developers, and they were working on such a narrow level. And when a lot of organizations, too, I saw it reorganized into agile teams, they did it by component. So, everybody was over every tiny little feature, and these teams were massive, right? Like, super huge scope. And some of the stuff was just not prioritized, right? It was done. Like, you didn't need to work on it, so they were finding work to do so people wouldn't get fired, right? Like, that's how the product owners operated. So, there was all this legacy baggage sometimes in companies, where they were all re-put on things by, by component, and they're just making up work to do.So SAFe introduced this kind of split between product manager and product owner, and if you look at the map, the product owner is part of the agile team, where they sit with the scrum masters, um, which there's a team coach that they call here and the developers. And then the product manager is sitting with a system architect and what they call a release train engineer. And what SAFe does is they pull a bunch of agile teams into a release train, and you get on the train when you're ready to ship things and you make sure that it all goes pretty smoothly to get to that potential shippable increment or that big feature launch that you would be doing with SAFe. And SAFe's really good at prescribing how to do that. They're great at describing, like, how to do the release trains, how to bring those teams together, how to put them on it. Um, and then they do this thing called big room planning, where they get the entire release train together, all these teams, they put them in a room and then every quarter you're kind of breaking down what we're all gonna work on. But where I hear frustration from teams every time I come in and train them is that when you do big room planning, a lot of times it's a commitment. So you start at the quarter, they haven't been doing good discovery, 'cause remember these people have not been trained on good discovery, so they don't really know what should be, they should be working on. They haven't been out talking to customers a lot of times. They kind of scramble. They figure out what, what needs to happen. Usually they have a backlog of stuff that does need to happen 'cause it just has to get done. Uh, they map it all out in a big room together, they commit to it and then that's the quarter, and they ask me, "When (laughs) , when am I supposed to do the discovery?" And I'm like, "Well, before that, ideally," right? Like, you should have a vision. You should be breaking it down. You should be putting discovery into that vision, talking to customers, feeding that in there. And then I hear, "We don't have time to do that because we sprint back to back." And I was like, "What does that mean?" And they're like, "As, as a team we go and we basically do two-week sprint into two-week sprint into two-week sprint into two-week sprint and I gotta make sure my developers are full. I gotta make sure they have things to work on. So if I go take time off to go talk to customers, which also is not my job as a product owner, it's my product manager's job, they'll feed me in what the customers are saying and then I break those down into features and I can work with the developers on it." So that's how all of this stuff starts going. And what happens in organizations that they don't understand here is that it's not the most efficient way to work, right? (laughs) You should be... Uh, I see a lot of developers out there become, uh, almost, like, how, how do you describe it? Uh, reliant on the product manager or product owner to tell them what to do. And even though you build them this great vision and you explain what needs to happen, they go, "Oh, I can't work on it 'cause the product owner hasn't, hasn't prioritized it." Right? And then they ask me, "If I don't have enough for the developers to do on feature work, what are they supposed to do?" And I say, "I guarantee you there's a ton of tech debt (laughs) they could be working on." Like, you don't have to scope that out. Like, let them choose what's the most important thing. They should be working together as developers and architects to figure out how to tackle some of that tech debt, how to get into it, right? It... While you're figuring out, is this the right thing to be building? So with all of this stuff it feels like people feel like they don't have time 'cause they're in a million meetings and the expectations of these companies is that every sprint we're, like, delivering software towards these roadmaps that we promised in the last quarter, and we're not checking to see if they're right. We're not checking to see if they're actually helping us move it forward. Um, and a lot of times the organizations are not set up with the right feedback mechanisms, the right user research, and the right, uh, data to tell us if everything is working so they can feed that in to the next release planning. So they're just planning, planning, planning, breaking it down into sprints and going. And SAFe is not good at describing how you do all that other work. So in a lot of this stuff too, they, they started putting on... There's, like, pieces that they put onto this map of SAFe where they're like, "Hey, you should do OKRs." And it's like, "This is what OKRs are. You should do a roadmap. This is what a roadmap is." So, like, how all of that cycle kind of works together where you're balancing discovery and delivery and feeding it in gets really confusing in organizations, and then what it's basically saying is a lot of the discovery work goes into the product managers, and the product managers... The product owners report into the product managers. And what I've seen that doesn't work here is that you are basically making these product owners order takers. They are extremely tactical, and then when it's time to actually be more strategic, let's say you want to be promoted to a product manager, well some organizations that's not even the same business line, the sa- not even the same career path. It's product owners go over here and product managers go here and they report in to different people. And if you ever want to move from product owner to product manager, a lot of times you don't get experience with the strategy, like figuring out what customers want, breaking it down, looking in, at the market research, determining, like, is this valuable? Is this what we should be working on? And they're not even getting exposure or a chance to do that because SAFe is like, "No. That's the product manager's job." Your job is to go really deep and work with the developers.

  10. 35:20 – 40:33

    Why Melissa doesn’t recommend SAFe

    1. MP

    2. LR

      Wow. Okay. So this also... A lot of this sounds quite absurd (laughs) as someone hearing all of the details and looking at this image. Uh, that being said, many companies are adopting this. It feels like it's growing. Like, more and more companies are adopting this as the way to work. I imagine the incentive is, "We just want to build great software and we don't know exactly how."

    3. MP

      Yeah.

    4. LR

      "And there's this ple- process we can plug in and it'll help us do it."

    5. MP

      Mm-hmm.

    6. LR

      S- I guess, thoughts on that, and do you find it, it can work or often works or often doesn't work? What is your experience with people adopting this and how it goes?

    7. MP

      I know a ton of companies that adopted SAFe about eight years ago and have got- gotten rid of it. Um, you know, Capital One just came out and said they got rid of all their agile roles, all their scrum roles. They were an early adopter of SAFe. They don't do it anymore. Um, and they, they wrote about that in the newspaper. Uh, I've seen it happen more often. Now, in a lot of or- organizations too, I'll see parts of them do SAFe and other parts not do SAFe. So it could change business line to business line.I don't think though that people grasp how much is still out there. (laughs) I get questions on SAFe every single day on the podcast. Like, I, everybody asks me, like, "Why are we still doing this?" And it's for what you said. Executives buy SAFe because it is the only framework out there that basically draws them a map and says, "Plug and play. Do this." And that's why everybody's so excited about it, because it's the only thing that specifies things to this level, and they went, "Oh, it's something I can understand. It's something that actually has definitions around it." And to be fair, that was, like, a great thing for SAFe to do as a marketing tool, you know? Like, bravo, (laughs) they created this thing that everybody wants. Like, it's a good product to sell. But it's overkill, and that's what I keep hearing from organizations is, it, it's basically taking the responsibility away from leaders to go figure their stuff out themselves as well. And if you are a new leader and, you know, you've just been dropped into this role, I have tremendous empathy for them because, yeah, where do you get started, right? Like, how do you try to run a technology organization? I, uh, somebody came and told me, the CIO came and told me, "I'm in charge now," right? "I'm in charge of all of the developers," or, "I'm in charge of all the product managers now." Where do you start, right? I can totally tell why people adopt SAFe because you're like, "Oh, I've been looking for the handbook," right? Like, "I've been looking for something to do here." But the problem is, it's only solving a little bit of the puzzle, which is bringing those teams together. And people do say it does release trains well, but it doesn't tell you also how to do your job as a leader. It leaves it all out. So they talk about portfolio visions and portfolio management in SAFe there too, but more often than not, I come in and I find everybody above product owners and product managers, let's talk about directors of product, VPs of product, right? They don't know what they should be doing as a VP of product or a director of product. It's like, "W- what's my role? What should I be feeding in here?" And SAFe doesn't even have that in there. That's not even a role. Like, product manager going up into those levels is not really there. So what do you do when you own a whole product line in an organization? What do you do when you're the head of product for a credit card at a bank, right? Like, what's my job? It doesn't say that. So there's a lot of people out these in- eh, or in these organizations that I've been working with who are, I'm like, "You, you were supposed to be doing strategy, right? And this is how you do strategy. This is how you go out and talk to customers. This is, um, the patterns that we have in software. Are you doing a plat- are you doing a platform strategy? Do you need APIs? How do you think about your app strategy, rolling it out? How do you do this here?" All of that stuff doesn't quite come from ways of working, which is what SAFe is doing, right? It's about how do you do your jobs in those areas. And a lot of organizations who adopt SAFe don't realize that you need a head of product, right? Like, you need somebody to actually be feeding that vision all the way down and making sure it's breaking up around the teams and controlling that portfolio vision and doing all of these things t- into it. So I have not seen SAFe slowing down by any means out there for people adopting it. I see more and more organizations, uh, adopting it. And I think we take for granted too, in Silicon Valley, like, how many people are just starting on their journey for digital transformations. There's a lot of, like, pharmaceutical companies, banks, insurance companies, like, they, they outsourced their development or they had an IT team, but they never had to really think about it before because digital wasn't as important. Now they do. And some of these companies, most of these companies are Fortune 50 companies, right? (laughs) Fortune 100 companies. And I think a lot of, like, the ones I see, at least banks, realized early on, "Hey, you know, when it comes to apps and how people interact with our, our, our stuff, software is important." But there's a lot of companies that did not catch that train, and they're just starting, and then they turn to things like SAFe because it gives them a guideline. "Hey, I've never done this before. I've been in this bank for 40 years. All I know is, like, waterfall-type development. What do we do?" And then we'll go, we'll go look at SAFe.

  11. 40:33 – 49:12

    Advice for implementing a digital transformation

    1. MP

    2. LR

      I love that we spend time on that 'cause I think it's really important. Like, you can be cynical about all this and, like, be like, "What the hell are people thinking? This is crazy." But as you described, people just have, like, a problem to solve. They have never done this before. They look for solutions. They find something that seems right. They see other people doing this and like-

    3. MP

      Yeah. (laughs)

    4. LR

      ... "Okay, let's try this thing." And what you've seen is it rarely actually works out, the SAFe-specific approach. So let's talk about people that are... There's, like, a few ways I think we can help folks. One is someone trying to do, say, an agile transformation or digital transformation, like how, your advice for how to actually do that better. And then I wanna talk about, like, say you're a product owner or a PM within a organization that works like this, what can you do? So maybe let's start with the first. Say someone's, like, trying to figure out what... "We n- we need to build better products. Something's not working right." SAFe is an option. Your suggestion is don't maybe do that. What, what should people do? And I know this is, like, a l- you're not gonna have the answer in, like, a short answer, but generally, how should people approach this?

    5. MP

      Yeah. When, when I've worked with companies on digital transformations, you have to, you want a development operating model, right? And that's where a lot of these agile methodologies came out of. You have to understand, that's just a development operating model. That's not actually gonna help you with go-to-market, with launching your products and with product management. So what I advise for companies to do is first sit down and say, "Hey, how do we think about building our operating model?" And when I think of, you know, product operating models and what I do with companies is, like, we break out, how do you determine product strategy? Do you have a good product strategy, right? You look at your organizational design. How are we, uh, actually organized around our products? Do we have good coverage of product managers and do we have skilled product managers up and down the organization? Then we wanna look at product operations. Do we have the infrastructure in there to help support these teams? Like, can they get the data to make decisions? Can they actually be in touch with customers?A lot of these large organizations haven't actually thought through many of those steps as well that enable product managers and development teams to be successful, right? They don't have ways for them to go and talk to customers. So, that's why they're not doing it. So I have a lot of empathy for people in these organizations as well who can't do product management well because of the bureaucracy or the things around it. So, leaders need to solve that, right? They need to understand what the role is and they need to open it up. And then we gotta look at our culture and incentives. Like, are we just rewarding people for shipping as many things as possible, right? Which is like, "Hey, just put everything you possibly can into that release train or that backlog." Or, are we coming back and saying, "Hey, is this valuable? Is this tying it back to our business?" Many organizations do not have a great product strategy, many large organizations that I've worked with. And it's that tying it back to the value piece, right? Tying it back to, "Is this gonna reach our company goals?" If you're a huge organization and let's say you're making billions of dollars a year and your, your goal is, like, expand geographically, what are you doing in your portfolio to actually enable that, right? Like, what products are you building to expand geographically? So many organizations don't have the transparency to actually even see that. One, like, crazy thing. A lot of people give large organizations a lot of flak for, and I know Marty does this too, for (laughs) for focusing on processes. I don't think processes are the enemy here. So for example, if I hear somebody really worried about getting a road mapping tool in there or something like that, I'm like, "Yes, you need that because you have no idea what your 4,000 teams are doing (laughs) and if they're actually coming back to the business goals," right? You have no infrastructure in there to be able to see that transparency. Those types of blocking and tackling is absolutely necessary for a transformation, right? For a organization to be stood up around software product management. You have to have the transparency to actually see those things. You do need to have enough process so that you as an organization can be efficient in getting things out the door, and that's what I think SAFe was trying to do. But it's not working because it's not solving the problems of the product management and it's not solving that problem of connecting the value back to the product teams. Instead, it's seen as a role that almost, like, babysits developers or kind of tells everybody what to do. But where's the discovery? Where's those things come in? And I know with the SAFe image that we got over here, like they try to drop things like Lean UX in there, which Jeff Gothel

    6. LR

      Oh.

    7. MP

      ... will think is hilarious. But it's not really pulling it all together of how do we do this on a cadence, right? How do we, how do we help people go out there and actually talk to customers? How do we enable them to do it? So if you're starting a transformation, it's not just thinking about, "How do we build the product?" But you should also be thinking about, "How do we launch the product and how do we make sure this is the right product to, to do?" Right? That's the big pieces of it, and that's where all that product strategy comes in. And you should also look at the career paths. And this is what really bothers me about Agile transformations and what bothers me with Scrum and SAFe, is that when we organized in these large trans- uh, large organizations into Agile teams, we made all these new roles called a product owner and so many organizations don't have a career path for them. So they, they email me and they go, "What's my career path?" (laughs) And, "What do I do next," right? "Where am I supposed to go?" And I've been saying for, like, 10 years, like, "This is not a team role. It's not just a team role," right? Like, it's a business role and it rolls all the way up to helping you further your business and you have to make sure that people on teams can be promoted to running multiple teams, can be promoted to running an entire product line. And to us, that's so simple in Silicon Valley, native software companies, but it's still unheard of in other organizations. And what happens too, and this is where I think leadership and C-suite needs to really pay attention. Because we're transforming in this way of working, what happens is some of the roles that we had before do not serve us now, right? Maybe we don't need a million project managers. Maybe, um, people in the business who decided what we were gonna build, are they the right people to bring with us on this next phase, right, into product management? Can they learn, right? Can they grok software? Do they understand those pieces? That's what we have to ask. But people are so... Organizations are so afraid sometimes to put these career ladders in because it kind of overhauls their traditional ways of working. And then they've got people who've been in these organizations for 40 years, and now you're saying like, "Hey, you're actually not in charge of that. The product manager is in charge of that." And that's scary.

    8. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. MP

      And a lot of them get in the way because of that. And if you really want to transform though, the C-suite has to be like, "Hey, we're going in this direction and just, just put it down." Because I've seen it run by a lot of middle managers, like, a transformation run by tons of middle managers, and those are the jobs that are usually in most jeopardy when you start transforming and you have to re-skill and you have to figure out what to do, and they don't wanna do that, right? Like, they're not going to be the ones who jump up and down and say, "Hey, let's do this." There's a lot of people out there, I think, pushing organizations to try harder and to... Internally as well. Like, I've worked with a lot of people who run these transformations who just really want it to work, and I think they, they do it with the best of intentions. But the C-suite has to understand, like, this is not just a transformation project, right? Like, this is a whole new way of working. And if we want a whole new way of working, we have to really rise to that occasion.

    10. LR

      This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests, to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar, Coda makes it much easier to stay organized.Coda is my go-to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets and apps to help me get more done, and Coda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. You can also access hundreds of pressure tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision-making frameworks. See for yourself why companies like DoorDash, Figma, and Qualtrics run on Coda. Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny and sign up to get six free months of the Team Plan. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get six months of the Team Plan, coda.io/lenny.

  12. 49:12 – 51:27

    An example of SAFe adoption

    1. LR

      There's a few things I want to pull out from which you just shared. One is, is it... Just to clarify, you recommend not using SAFe? You don't think that's a good approach?

    2. MP

      I do not recommend using SAFe. I, I think there are... Yeah.

    3. LR

      Great.

    4. MP

      I, I... There are people who like SAFe, so let me just say this. It's... There are people who found success with 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. So I'm like, "It's not actually SAFe by the book." If you do that, fine, right? Like, that's any process, right? Like, if you ended up adopting SAFe and you wanna go back and look at it, and say, "Actually, let's just get rid of all the stuff that's not working and keep the stuff that is," fine, right? But being open to understanding, like, this is not the way that we do good product management. Like, there is not a lot in SAFe about doing good product management. Like, that's the stuff that we have to understand. It could help in certain areas, and I do think it does help in certain areas, bring some, you know, some rigor to things. But if you take it too far, it will, it will destroy things. There's actually a great story about a wa- (laughs) oh, the, a water company in the Netherlands, right? And, uh, they decided to adopt SAFe, and this is, this was on the news, like, couple of months ago. They decided to adopt SAFe in their IT teams and start working with it, (laughs) and they're, uh, they ended up going bankrupt. And the reason they ended up going bankrupt is because the teams were learning the processes for SAFe. They were taking so long to deploy their new invoicing system and payment collections that they couldn't collect payments from customers 'cause they got so caught up in the process. And that, that's what I see happen a lot in these organizations. Instead of talking about what's really important, which is, "Hey, how are we serving our customers? How are we winning in this market? How are we, you know, how do we stem churn? How do we do all these things?" We're talking instead about, like, "What standups are we doing?" And, "Oh, how do we do this releas- release planning? And, oh my God, you guys didn't sprint back-to-back. Like, you did it wrong." And that's not... The... We're, we're talking about work about work, but we're not actually getting into, "What are we achieving here?" And that, that's the, the part I do not like about rigid processes when it comes to this.

  13. 51:27 – 56:53

    The value of experienced product leaders

    1. MP

    2. LR

      So that touches on the other theme I wanted to bring up, is it feels like the stuff is, uh, kind of a replacement for skilled, talented people, like a product leader that understands how to do these things and has product taste and has organized teams to build great product. Like, it feels like people are just, "We don't have that, so we're gonna create th- we're gonna... This process is gonna fix all our problems." Ta- Can you talk about just the importance of that, like, the people you hire to run these things as key to this, if, if that's true?

    3. MP

      In a lot of organizations, the people who buy SAFe, they have not run large-scale technology organizations before, um, or they- they're new to this way of working. So they adopt SAFe, and they- they hope it works because it looks like a nice plan, like we said, to go out and do things. And when you're doing a transformation, a lot of companies are pulling people into these roles for the first time. I've said since day one that I've been working with companies, it's okay and I think it's noble to wanna train people and put them in different roles. Tot- Like, cool, if you're gonna spend money upskilling your people, like, do that. But you also have to intersperse people who know what they're doing, and I think at leadership, it's really important to bring in somebody who knows what they're doing to help run this type of thing. So there are more people out there and more leaders who have done this before 'cause we've been doing this for 10 years. So there's Sruti Patel, uh, she's chief product officer at, uh, US Bank for small business banking. I just had her on the podcast. She worked at Shopify. She saw how great teams worked, right? And then she was able to come and help apply that at a bank. So she, she's experienced, right? She's an experienced product person who comes in to help. Uh, Melissa Doros is the CPO of Green Dot Bank, and she had worked at Discover Financial leading the transformation there, you know, did all that work, and then could bring it to Green Dot Bank. Like, she can see what needs to happen, what needs to actually go on here. So we've got more and more people out there who have done this before who are looking for these opportunities to do it in the bank, and I think it's important for C-suite to bring them in, right? To actually look at that. And where I've seen transformations be the most successful in all these organizations is when you do that mix, right? You keep, you keep some of your people, but you also bring people in to learn, and I get hired all the time to come in and train... I've worked with almost every, like, Fortune 50 company at this point, Fortune 100 company too. And I get in, I come in to train a lot of product managers, and we do it through, you know, Product Institute, and we'll train everybody. And what used to happen about, like, eight years ago is they train everybody, and they would say, "Go." Where do you go after you bring in the consultants to do training to keep learning, right? How do they watch other people in the organization do great product management if there's nobody in the organization who's done it before? And luckily, I think a lot of organizations are realizing that. So more leaders are out there, um...... who are saying, "Hey, I've gotta actually intersperse skills here," right? Like, "I need to bring in some more directors who are experienced here, some more individual contributors who are experienced here." And those organizations, I think, are wildly successful 'cause they recognize it, and they say, "I've gotta make sure that people can learn from others." 'Cause that's how you keep developing, right? Like, that's how we all keep developing. It's not just doing all external classes. And that's where I think these things become powerful. And you could do that at all levels. You don't have to just do it with the teams. You could do it at director level. You could do it at VP level. That, that's how we should be thinking about this. Now, there are some CPOs out there and some VPs of product in these large organizations who are new to this way of working, but they've committed themselves to learning and to trying to figure out how to do it best. And they're not saying, "Hey, I'm just gonna adopt SAFe," or, "I'm just gonna do whatever is over here." They're actually saying, "What don't I know?" And I'm watching them go out to talk to other CPOs, do all these other things, and they usually have great market knowledge, great business knowledge, and they're fantastic at strategy, and then they hire people underneath them who are great at the other pieces, like the execution and getting, getting the software out the door. And I think those people are successful in it as well 'cause they notice their skill gaps, and they hire for it just like any great leader would. So, in these organizations, I, I do see sometimes SAFe or something being a crutch for people who don't know what they're doing to bring in. And if you really think about, hey, how do I make this better and, uh, have that continuous learning mindset and that way to wanna propel this forward, I think you'll consider other options and start to think about broader than just SAFe, broader than just agile, what do we need to make this successful? But the key part of this too is recognizing that product management is not just this, this role in SCRUM, and I, I say this in my, like, talk too. I say, "Take SCRUM away. You still need product management," right? Like, product owner doesn't exist without SCRUM. That's not a thing, but you still need product managers, and that's why all product owners should be product managers. They should be fundamentally product managers. And that's why I do not like these career traject- ge- uh, tra- trajectories that keep them separate. Like, sure, if you want to have a principal IC product manager like they do in a lot of large Silicon Valley companies, perfect. Like, let people keep working on those things. They don't have to go into management. But that doesn't mean they're different between a IC product owner and a IC product manager. It shouldn't be different

  14. 56:53 – 1:04:14

    Career paths for product owners

    1. MP

      there.

    2. LR

      Perfect segue to where I wanted to go next, which is say you're a product owner today listening to this, and you're like, "Man, this sounds... This is exactly my life. What can I do?" What's your advice to folks in that role right now about how to potentially become product managers, build the skills they need to be, to not just be stuck in this career path that doesn't go anywhere?

    3. MP

      Yeah, I think the first thing is bringing awareness to that your role is more than just working with the developers. A lot of leaders argue with me that we need product owners because it just doesn't scale, and I've seen, you've seen massive companies that scale where they don't have any product owners. So I-

    4. LR

      Right.

    5. MP

      ... I don't under- I do not understand that s- It's a weak argument to me. It's a very weak argument. It just means you don't know how to distribute the work evenly and give a little bit of strategic guidance to product owners so that they can go, or product managers, right, on a team so that they can go and build visions and cut down features and stuff like that. If you're a product owner and you're like, "Hey, I don't have the opportunity to talk to customers. My product manager does that. I'm just working with the teams. I wanna be more strategic. I wanna think longer term," I'd say try to take some ownership over that and push back on the things that are being given to you. I was doing a workshop for Mind the Product, like, back in the day, and I had a product owner in my workshop, and she said, "I don't think the things we're working on," they were doing SAFe, "are the right things to work on." And I said, "You should bring this to your, your manager." And she, he- she was like, "I don't know. I'm gonna get fired. I don't think it's still the right thing. What am I gonna work on if we're not gonna work on this?" And I'm like, "Well, this is the beauty of product instead of project," right? We, we stay with the product. Just because your project ends doesn't mean that you lose your job. So, she put together this whole thing, went and said, "I don't think we should be working on this," and they promoted her. So they were like, "Fantastic," right? So she took this leap of faith and went out there and started saying, "This is more. We need to do more." I think if you're a product owner and there's no career path for you, start asking leaders what your career path is 'cause it's gonna make them go, "Oh, great question." (laughs) Like, "What should the career path be?" And there's a lot of literature out there about how we make career paths. So, you can start there, right? Ask what's next for you after this product owner role. I would ask the product managers if you, if they're doing all the customer research, see if you can do some customer research with them, right? Go sit in on it. And a lot of them will say, "Oh, I don't have time. I don't have time to do this." Strip back all the user stories you're working on. Stop thinking about it as a quantitative metric that needs to just go up and up. Instead, really think about the value you're delivering with your team. Is this the right thing? And when you talk to leaders and when you present your case, you say it in a way of, "Hey, I'm working on an X, Y, and Z feature. What's the goal here? When we release this, what do we hope will happen?" I think that's one of the best questions anybody can ask if they're worried their company is not focused on outcomes, right? "What do we hope will happen when we release this? What metrics are we gonna change? How do we instrument it to make sure that's true?" Then we can go back and actually see if it changed. One simple question to get alignment on it, and then you can start to say, "Oh, that didn't work," or, "This did work. Great. Why did it work?" And you can open up those conversations. So, I'd say there's a lot of things you can do to help move your companies forward, and I have seen in a lot of these organizations too a groundswell of product owners and product managers saying, "Hey, you know, like, what's next for me? What's going on?" That makes the organizations go and figure it out. I was working with one, like, Fortune 10 company not too long ago, their C-suite, and I've been working with them for a very long time. And they're finally like, "Hey, we're gonna codify the product manager role, and we're gonna have it all the way up and down our organization. We're gonna make roles. We're gonna make responsibilities."To me, that was music to my ears. But the reason they were doing it too is because they noticed there was a lot of churn in the organization in that role, and they also realized it's a critical role. So they're losing good people because people from the outside are coming because they wanna work for this great, you know, big organization that's doing super well. Like, fantastic. But they get in there and they go, "Where's my, like, where's my career path?" Right? "What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?" So a lot of leaders are out there now realizing like, "Hey, we do have to get our stuff together." And the only reason they're, they're coming to this conclusion as well is because they're looking around, seeing other people doing it, and they hear it from the teams, right? They hear it from the product managers. So I don't want people to think like, "Hey, I have no power. I'm in a 10,000 person organization." The more you bring this up, the more your leaders will respect it 'cause they don't wanna lose you, right? They don't want to, they don't wanna lose good people. So if you wanna be great at your job and you need more support there, like speak up, right? Speak up. At a certain point, I do tell people this, if you feel like you can't do great product management in your organization, try to find another organization. And I know that is hard to say and I, I respect like people are tied to insurances and, you know, it's hard to change jobs. But if you do have the opportunity to look for another organization that does it well, I would go there. I would also say in large corporations too, I've seen certain business lines and certain divisions do it super well and then others not. So if you are in a large corporation, maybe think about moving internally, like laterally to a different team and seeing if you can work there. I'd find the leaders who know what they're doing and go work for them. That's usually the best move here.

    6. LR

      The point you made about how a lot of companies don't have any product owners and have scaled very wide, just to reinforce that in the data dive that we did on job, job market trends, like no tech company has a product owner-

    7. MP

      Yeah.

    8. LR

      ... basically.

    9. MP

      Exactly.

    10. LR

      Like no top tech company. And I know there's an important distinction here, like these are tech software first product first businesses where their business is the software they're building. And a lot of the companies we're talking about here are not that, they're like banks and telecoms, pharmaceutical companies. So I get that it's like a very different world.

    11. MP

      Mm-hmm.

    12. LR

      But I think it's important to highlight, like you can become very big, like Google has no product owners as far as I know. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, like no company you, you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner. They have... Or they're all product managers, they're all product managers.

    13. MP

      Yeah. And I, I don't want th- I don't want people to think that there aren't people who build great software in these large corporations too, because there are, right? There's pockets of people who are doing it super, super well. And if you are one of those people who's been pushing the boundaries, doing great work, and your title is a product owner, what I always tell people on your resume if you're looking for your next job so that you're not like pushed out, let's say, of these large corporations like a Google or somewhere like that, and that's where you wanna work in a tech firm, make sure you describe how you did your job from a value perspective. Do not talk about your agile cadences. Get Scrum out of there. Right? Talk about what value you brought to the users and what metrics you moved and that's how your resume should be laid out. 'Cause I do read tons of resumes to hire people and I, and also like chief product officers, same thing. If I see immediately like implemented Scrum processes across the organization, I'm like, "Nope, that's not what I need." Right? That's not what I was looking for. I was looking for what are you gonna do to push the strategy in that part of the organization? What are you gonna do to actually build better products for customers? And then when you get into the interview, you can talk about what things you did to do that. But you wanna make sure that you're focused on really understanding the customer and translating that into great products and the outcomes that we were looking for when you do it on your resume. I think that's important.

  15. 1:04:14 – 1:06:41

    Transitioning from product owner to product manager

    1. MP

    2. LR

      Okay. I wanna spend more time here 'cause this is so important. So this is kind of highlighting, here's the difference between a product owner and a product manager. And so if you want to move into product management and become a great PM, if you're a product owner today, even if you're not a product owner and just want to get into product management, can you again just highlight, here's like the big difference and here's the skills that people value most in a PM versus a product owner?

    3. MP

      Yeah. When I see product owners write out their, um, their resumes or describe their job functions, they always approach it from a process standpoint. I prioritize the backlog. I worked with the developers to break down the work. I check the developer's work and accept, did the acceptance criteria. I wrote the user stories. All those functions is what I see over and over and over again in a product owner resume. What you wanna do instead is say, "I led the..." You can even do the login API, right? "I led the work around the login API. The problem that I was solving around it was, you know, trying to enhance security for our login protocols to meet regulatory requirements." I interviewed a bunch of users. I got up to speed on the regulatory requirements. I worked really closely with our legal teams and our compliance teams to translate that into something that was gonna secure our bank. And when we launched, we were able to meet our compliance, save our bank like a couple million dollars, and we smoothly transitioned into these new security requirements without disrupting any service for customers for 4 million customers. Right? Way different story than, "I prioritized backlog and I, I shipped it off to developers." Take it a step further. If you're working on customer facing things, who are your customers? Did you go out and talk to them? I, by, you know, interfacing with customers and understanding them, I was able to solve X, Y, and Z problem with them, which resulted in a measurable amount of X, Y, and Z metric going up for the business. Right? I, I ran this function, I ran this feature, I launched this feature, I watched it through, I iterated on it. I did the stuff that was needed to make this successful. That's what I wanna see on a resume. So even if we have a product owner title, I'll still read the details and everybody else will too. But I will say there's sometimes a poor connotation when you have that title, unfortunately, because of the baggage that's associated with agile. So even just like on resumes, I would say do product owner/product manager, right? Like in, in there just to let people know that I know how to do this and I've been doing this well, right? But if you do that in your bullet points, that shows up as well.There's

  16. 1:06:41 – 1:11:43

    Be careful relying on certifications

    1. MP

      also this whole concept that we didn't even get into about certifications, and people keep asking me if I want to transition into product management, should I get a certification, an Agile certification? And I feel like these were bigger a couple years ago, but they're still big. So if you ever see somebody with a CSPO on the end of their profile, which you probably have seen on LinkedIn, it's a certified scrum product owner. Now, one thing to remember, and this is about all Agile stuff, is, like, we call it the Agile industrial complex. Agile coaches and Agile trainers, so, like, uh, the whole scrum team, scrum.org, ScrumInc, SAFe, everybody, the way they make their money is through consulting to teach you these processes and by having people be trained to get these certifications. So they come in and they say, "All your people need to be certified scrum product owners." So it's like, give me, give me 2,500 bucks per person, and then they get a certificate at the end of a two-day class that says they're a certified scrum product owner. Doesn't necessarily mean they can do the job. (laughs) Doesn't necessarily mean they can do product management. But let's think about, like, when we were talking about too, and should we adopt SAFe in general? Should we adopt these things? Think about-

    2. LR

      Right.

    3. MP

      ... how these organizations make money. (laughs) They're selling certifications, right? Of course they want more and more people to adopt it. Like, that's, that's the idea here. So they're, they're selling you this dream that they, you, you know, all the... You just certify all your people, and then you can be working on it. So they take all these people, they put them in two-day classes or whatever, and they churn them out and then they say, "Go." Like, "You're a completely new role." Doesn't work that way, right? Like, that's not in the best interest of your company. That's not really what we're looking for here, and that's why all of this stuff needs to go deeper. So if you've done a CSPO class and you have that certification, it may help you get hired at another large enterprise that is adopting Scrum and SAFe, right? That will probably help you there. If you want to transition into tech and go into the companies that we talk about, they're probably gonna look at that and say, "Uh, this person doesn't know what they're doing," right? Like, "This, this is not here." So if you do know what you're doing and you did that for a reason, because some people need that to get promoted. Some companies actually require it, which is crazy, but, like, to get promoted or be the thing, I have tremendous empathy for that. So you're gonna have to do a lot of work explaining in your resumes and stuff as you transition that you know more than that, right? You're not just a CSPO, you're with a two-day class, you have done the work. And that's where all of this building up on your resume becomes really, really important. It's not just about getting certified. That's why, like, I, I had people ask me, they're like, "Can you just certify product managers?" And I'm like, "No, if people take my course, I give them a certificate of completion," and it's a completion. So you finished a course just like any other course. But I will not certify product managers because I do not think you can ever say somebody is prepared and able to do their job from a short class, right? If... Now, if you are doing... There, there are some Agile agencies that do a lot more training where you have different levels, and what they would do is they would train people, but then they would make them go do work and they had a coach that they worked with and they'd go back and forth and they could demonstrate that they could do the work over time to get to the next level. And, uh, it's almost like the PMP, like the project management certification where you have to have time actually doing the job. That's different, right? Like, that's a different type of skill. It's a different type of certification. But if you see any, like, CSPOs, it's typically a two-day workshop that they went to and then got certified. So, that's the difference with this, and I would say be careful if you are a product owner wanting to be a product manager of just certifications. Like, all the large tech organizations I know too, they're not looking for certifications in product management or product ownership to hire people. They're looking for experience. But the organizations that might not know what they're doing, they are looking for CSPOs, right? They are looking for, for that. And then if you're... It's required by your organization, you might have to ask, like, "Do... Are we all well set up here to do our best job?" Right? "Is this the place where I'm gonna learn how to be a better product manager?" I also feel bad though for people because it's hard to be a product manager. It's hard to get your foot in the door, right? So I, I, I'm so torn on it because there are organizations that hire people with a CSPO and they require it. So, of course, if it gets your foot in the door, you know, and it helps you, do it. But if it's not gonna help you and it's not gonna put you in the career path you want, I, I, I don't think it's worth the money.

    4. LR

      I think one interesting thread throughout this whole conversation is, rarely is a plug-in, play-ish, easy solution gonna be the solution, the answer to your problem. Whether it's plugging in SAFe and it's gonna help us build great software, taking a class, helping you become a great product manager. Be skeptical of that.

Episode duration: 1:24:19

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