Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about SAFe and the product owner role | Melissa Perri

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Thanks, Lenny. Thanks for having me.

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.