The article and commenter are talking about a single management role, Product. You say “retain managers” — plural. You’re putting words in their mouth.
They had something like Extreme Programming, and it was not a good time from what I heard. If you want to live in la la land of coding for a profitable business, well, sorry to break it to you, but a cohort of smart people need to be led. Notice I said led, not managed.
Also, the role is called Product Owner not Product Manager, I would imagine that was a conscious choice. If a PO feels like a manager, that’s what’s wrong. And maybe why that could be is the engineering team’s fault for having an insatiable need to.. control all aspects of their day-to-day. However, it’s a business at the end of the day, not a coding playground.
The article is basically suggesting POs shouldn’t control the backlog because engineers know better (essentially). Sounds like they’ve had a bad experience and want to vent about it. Fine, but it’s an immature take imho.
I am an engineer myself and I think it’s insulting to the people who have to take the work that engineers do (or fail to do because they want to experiment) and cross the divide and tell the business that the work you’ve done is worth everyone’s salary.
I don’t want to control the backlog with a bunch of other knuckleheads, thanks.
> You say “retain managers” — plural. You’re putting words in their mouth.
The only use of "managers" was with respect to the use of Scrum itself, which is only tangentially related to what came before it. It logically cannot put words into anyone's mouth as it is not directly related to any mouths that may be near. It is only directly related to the comment that it is contained within by the additional context it setup.
> The article is basically suggesting POs shouldn’t control the backlog because engineers know better (essentially).
Yes, that is what Agile also says. Of course, it also says that you need the right people. We need to know more about the specific engineers to know if it is a valid take. Statistically it won't be, but perhaps it is under his unique circumstances? It is invalid to conflate his situation with someone else's.
> Sounds like they’ve had a bad experience and want to vent about it. Fine, but it’s an immature take imho.
I know Agile isn't cool anymore, but there was a time where the industry as a whole actually tried to embrace it. It wasn't considered immature then. Perhaps it is immature now only because it is no longer in fashion?
> I am an engineer myself and I think it’s insulting
If you are insulted by words on a screen, you might need to think about it harder. That is not logically sound.
The whole industry faces very real problems managing a large project. Agile promised to make thing better and nothing else did (lots of things before made the same promise - and failed to deliver), so on a few small success stories the industry jumped. However we are now realizing that despite some good ideas, agile didn't deliver the promise we wanted. That doesn't mean agile is bad just that it wasn't the "silver bullet" management wanted.
I don't think agile itself made all the promises that large projects wanted. However it made a few and then consultants seeing money jumped in and made more promises. Often agile couldn't deliver on the promises because there is good reason large projects can't allow engineers control over some of the things agile demanded engineers control.
Everyone wants to throw out Agile. However I don't see anything to replace it.
> That doesn't mean agile is bad just that it wasn't the "silver bullet" management wanted.
Managers didn't want to be eliminated? Who'd a thunk it. Which is also why Agile is oft considered "bad" as management by and large never actually walked away, they just pushed some of workload off onto developers under the guise of "Agile" and half-ass adopted tools designed for a flat organizational structure in a hierarchical structure with all of the impedance mismatches to go along with that.
> Everyone wants to throw out Agile. However I don't see anything to replace it.
It's not so much that anyone, non-manager at least, wants to throw out Agile per se, but in this high (relatively, at least) interest rate environment there is more of a crackdown on the work people are doing, so managers are trying to reel back in the boring work they earlier tried to outsource onto developers in order to continue to justify their jobs. That is what has replaced it, so to speak.
Upper management wants to get things done (and their golf game/whatever they do). They see software is expensive, late, and buggy.
Each middle manager wants to be the person who delivers and thus gets a promotion (eventually leading to upper management). If they eliminate other middle managers on the way that is okay (depending on politics of course).
Yes, you bring up a good point about the other practical issue with adopting Agile. It says that the developers and the business people need to work together daily, as becomes necessary when there isn't a manager to act as the go-between, but as you point out the business people in reality just want to play golf, not become shared participants in the development process.
But, again, Agile is pretty clear that it requires special people. It was never meant for everyone. To observe it in a light where it is applicable to all organizations violates its very existence.
They had something like Extreme Programming, and it was not a good time from what I heard. If you want to live in la la land of coding for a profitable business, well, sorry to break it to you, but a cohort of smart people need to be led. Notice I said led, not managed.
Also, the role is called Product Owner not Product Manager, I would imagine that was a conscious choice. If a PO feels like a manager, that’s what’s wrong. And maybe why that could be is the engineering team’s fault for having an insatiable need to.. control all aspects of their day-to-day. However, it’s a business at the end of the day, not a coding playground.
The article is basically suggesting POs shouldn’t control the backlog because engineers know better (essentially). Sounds like they’ve had a bad experience and want to vent about it. Fine, but it’s an immature take imho.
I am an engineer myself and I think it’s insulting to the people who have to take the work that engineers do (or fail to do because they want to experiment) and cross the divide and tell the business that the work you’ve done is worth everyone’s salary.
I don’t want to control the backlog with a bunch of other knuckleheads, thanks.