It’s not time for a “2-Weeks-Sprint Jira Hero”!
Do you remember the times, when a janitor was just a janitor?
Well, those times are long gone. Nowadays the same person is called a “senior large-scale facility manager” — or something like this.
The same happens to digital product roles and this is a huge problem.
Maybe this is due to the extended “think-time” during COVID-19 or maybe it is just because people want to be seen as experts and start inventing things no one needs.
Three examples of current product bullshit
Product Ops
Somehow (I cannot explain), people came up with the idea to establish a role for “Product Operations” besides Product Owners and Product Managers.
The idea:
Have someone who optimizes processes and tools for the product managers — or even does the operational smaller things like conducting user interviews and so on (source).
Guess what this is called elsewhere?
Product Managers or IT admin or Junior whatever (depending on complexity). There is definitely no need to invent a new fancy title for an already existing process!
Still, people are discussing about it and get really excited (I suppose because it is new and people are bored).
See the discussion with a VC investor on LinkedIn: What do you think about Product Ops? Must-have or overrated?
Product Manager vs. Product Owner
The Product Owner (PO) somehow originated from the SCRUM processes.
The title is now used to describe …
That (the dots) is the problem.
To be honest, this might be the one example, where I would say it is fair to use. However, the difference is marginal.
Some say the Product Manager (PM) acts in a more strategic way, while the PO rather works on the operational level, writing requirements and user stories. This is a nice theoretical differentiation, but in practice, it simply makes things unnecessarily complicated!
Even worse, most (99% imho) people do not know about this difference.
This leads to the situation where the roles get totally mixed up.
When I was searching through job offerings (see for yourself by checking indeed), there were PO roles close to a CPO and PM roles which were basically described as “manage the backlog”.
The important thing here: The job description differentiates, not the title.
Value Streams
This is not about a new product role or title, but highlights the same strange process.
Some folks invented “Value Streams”.
Basically what you’ve already doing, if you are working under agile principles.
Because one part of agile is adjusting the process to whatever works best, while at the same time focusing on “creating value for the user”.
There is no need to put a fancy name on a friction of an existing concept, except you want to pull money out of some words.
Again, it is something shiny new for an already existing process — especially if you are doing product management the right way.
Filling old wine in new bottles.
For more details, respectively an example, see this article:
First Waterfall then Agile now Value Stream
Why do people do this?
Despite my thoughts from the beginning, when it comes to solid reasons, I would say there is only one:
Differentiation and organizational structure.
This especially gets important when you are dealing with people, who do not fulfill the role in all its details.
Or, the other way around, when you have a role, which fulfills only a tiny part of talented people’s expectations.
It is more or less what the industrialization and labor division had done to our economy so many decades ago.
Splitting the process chain in tiny little bites and defining a distinctive title for each and every one sitting in this line.
Is this necessary? Absolutely not!
Product Managers are meant to be the glue between people, pushing the product, being the user’s advocate.
They are meant to adapt to whatever is needed in the product-development-area (including product marketing).
They are meant to adjust processes to whatever is needed to work.
If you, for example, google any definition of “Product Ops”, it describes exactly what has always been part of a product manager’s role.
And even if not, there are already roles for it — for example the “Data Analyst” or “Market Research Expert”.
Similar when thinking about the Product Owner.
And similar with Value Streams. “Agile” was never meant to be a fixed process, but rather principles to better work on IT development.
I wrote about this also in my article “Agile or Waterfall with External Development Teams”.
Bottom Line: You do not need this differentiation, when you have Product Managers.
But it is not harmful, is it?
Wrong, it is!!
Let’s get to the real problem behind my little rant.
Do not get me wrong!
It is important, especially at larger organizations, to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
And even differentiation can be important to people.
I called myself a “technical PM”, since it became somehow rare to have a developer background as a PM.
Still, this is only a describing adjective. It is not a whole new title.
The HR problem behind
Companies do not understand the differences, mix it up, mistake it, and change it back again. Think about PM vs. PO.
This leads to chaos over and over.
And this leads to the “inventors” coming up with even more stupid things.
One day, you will need to deal with the “Jira 2-Weeks-Sprint Hero”, because the role only has the job to start the SCRUM sprint in Jira and it has a 2 weeks duration.
Usually also not very fulfilling for the employee.
Now think of HR in another company.
They are usually never experienced product managers, but HR manager (surprise).
They will be like: “Oh, but I know we do 1-week-sprints. OUT!”.
Can you see the problem?
I have seen this multiple times for the PO/PM differentiation.
Full-Scale Product Managers were called Product Owners in their previous job and got kicked out by corporate HR, because they were looking for a Product Manager.
Where does this lead to?
Having a “Senior Product Manager for the smaller things as long as it does not affect code, but without talking to marketing, because this it the product ops guy and only going to meeting together with the project manager and yeah, getting coffee for my boss is also part of my professional job title”?
It does not stop there
The same irritation can develop on basically any level — from family & friends to meetups or even when writing something on Medium.
So, please!
Stop making up funny new names without changing anything fundamental.
Keep this for times when you suddenly really have new things and roles like a Warp-Engine-Engineer!
Otherwise you are not creating any value, but rather adding new inefficiencies.
