With the current situation, I’m starting to see why so many companies are against remote work. For remote teams to work effectively, everyone has to understand their role and perform it properly. Since I’m not working at the moment, I spend my days learning as much as I can…and eavesdropping on my husband’s work. What I find from that eavesdropping is jaw dropping. What I have observed are things companies don’t want people to see.
Keep in mind, I have my CSPO, so I am certified as an Agile Product Owner. I also have a masters in Business Administration and a Project Management certification, so my observations are coming from a place of knowledge and experience.
So far (just since the start of this pandemic), I have observed some serious atrocities. The product owner my husband works with has repeatedly had the devs write her stories for her (I truly think she doesn’t know how to write her own stories). She has no understanding of SDLC, and wouldn’t know how to create a roadmap if an Agile Coach walked her through it.
When the team delivers beyond their goals, she immediately piles more work onto them without giving them a chance to test what they’ve already done. This results in overloading QA every iteration.
What she did yesterday completely took the cake. I overheard all the meetings. First she argued with the devs about adding a feature to the the current release that had been scheduled for the next release. The devs repeatedly told her that the feature wasn’t ready, it had not been tested, and that it would not be ready until the next release. She then went behind their backs, enabled the feature anyway, thought that it worked, and sold it to a customer. From there, it became apparent that the feature was not ready, so she came back in a meeting to berade the devs. She claimed that their work was “crap” and that this feature “should have been ready”.
What I really want to know is how someone so incompetent has held this position so long? I can only assume that the people in charge have no idea how incompetent she really is. When I had lunch with the company’s CPO, he acted as if their product department was some kind of elite, top notch department. What I’m observing here at home indicates quite the opposite.
This is why I think that C-suite executives need to stay in touch with their employees. If these executives keep current on the methods used in their company, and regularly walk through (or in the case of remote, sit in), they can see first hand if these kind of incompetencies are occurring. Many times issues like this are a simple matter of training. This particular PO is so close to retirement that training would probably be a waste.
In the end, this level of incompetency is a failure of management that effects the entire company. When this one PO cannot see the product vision and overloads her team and QA, that affects the overall quality of the product, as well as the overall moral of the company. Her incompetence can eventually lower productivity throughout the company. The only way to combat this kind of issue is to have management that is truly engaged and concerned with how the company is run.
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