> - do they care? They don’t have to agree with my opinions. We can hammer out a compromise with enough laughs. I just want them to care. Because there’s still a lot of things that even the best protocols, procedures, and practices can’t cover.
Are their pay and their working conditions the best that the market can offer to them?
> - can they be responsible? Or have they bought into the fantasy where they offload responsibility to a “decider” while they play the role exclusively of “doer”?
Do they have the decision power and the salary that go hand in hand with high responsibility?
I would argue that you have presented a chicken and egg problem.
As a business owner I am reluctant to offer a new entrant the best pay “that the market can offer”. Working conditions - a company can only offer the best within their means.
I know that good faith must comes from both sides, and a company has to offer something worthwile in return. Like any type of relationship, its a two way street.
But a sense of entitlement firstly, and then maybe if the company is lucky that the employee will care and take responsibility - that is a relationship one better not enter from the onset, if it can be detected ahead of time. Its just the wrong value set.
I would also add that a company that displays the same kind of entitlement towards its workers, is also not worth an employee’s further attention.
So do you regularly increase employee salaries to match their demonstrated competency and responsibility? Or are you like most employers, giving new hires better pay than your current top performers, incentivising your top performers to find a better paid job somewhere else?
tbh it's blurry in English too, because you can be abstractly "responsible" / "a responsible person" which is a general virtue, while also being "responsible for" something / "the responsible person" i.e. some formal role which should also come with compensation. But I think the former case is what travisgriggs meant, and it's also something I expect from everyone regardless of level/role/pay.
If someone's answer to "why does clicking 'Save' and then reloading not show the saved data?" is "the product requirements only said there should be a Save button, not that the data should be saved", I don't want to work with them. If you want something like this go work for a body shop, not a product-focused company - and then don't complain when you never get the interesting technical work.
I agree that everyone should feel responsible for fulfilling their part of the contract, not just in the most shallow way.
> "the product requirements only said there should be a Save button, not that the data should be saved"
If these were really the requirements, then the PO's salary should be split and go to the developers, because they would need to do that job anyway and at least do not get distracted by an incompetent PO.
You think a PO is incompetent if they hand over a mockup with a "Save" button and not a 200 page document that among every other detail says "Clicking or otherwise depressing the 'Save' button should persist the information in fields A, B, and C into the database within 500ms" or some such overspecification? We're selling ads, not sending people to the moon.
This kind of culture eventually produces the equivalent stupid formalization on the dev side like "all modules must have at least 99.85% coverage and a three-phase UML diagram review by the architecture team before deployment".
Better to have some slack and people willing to use common sense on both sides.
I think a PO is mostly useless if they do not provide a clear set of acceptance criteria. Low-effort requirement descriptions are just shifting the responsibility to the developers, because they leave too much room for interpretation. Lack of technical understanding is another common source of friction. TBH, the best PO that I worked with has a CS degree.
I agree. I'd expect a huge compensation gap between someone who types up "make a save button" when the user says "I want to save", and some who comes up with "Users wish to persist state between uses of the application, therefore we want to retain the users current balance, brightness setting..."
The former shouldn't be paid more than a front desk receptionist, and I'll keep the difference since I'll be picking up the rest of the role.
I did say "a mockup with a Save button", not "a rock with 'Save plz' carved into it thrown through the devs' office window." Yes, the PO has to care too.
I guess count yourselves lucky you've only had bad POs and not bad POs and bad developers.
I think we are talking about different complexities of projects. In a complex project in a complex environment in a team larger than 2, a mockup often does not cut it. I've seen underspecified requirements leading to misunderstandings countless times. I have never seen a situation where I thought that writing down those 5-15 acceptance criteria upfront was a waste of time. The discussions that follow when a deadline was missed because of misunderstandings feel much more like a waste of time to me.
In a simple project a mockup can be enough, but then what do you need a PO for?
Mockup is great if you are just working on the front end, but what is the save button actually supposed to do? I can figure that out, talk to the users and understand what they want to save, but I feel like that's the product owners job.
Likewise, a programmer who can only code a solution when given a spec like the latter, should only be paid as much as the help desk tech, since the PO will be picking up the rest of the role.
I can get a receptionist to type "make a save button" into a jira ticket when the customer asks for it (that's more than some PO's I've had have done, some would just copy and paste the email from the customer into the ticket providing no additional context or clarification), can you get a help desk person to build the app?
The absolute worst PO I ever worked with had a CS degree, and kept asking stuff like "why aren't you using MVC" and specifying technical details that wouldn't work rather than a product vision.
Deep technical knowledge can help a PO, especially in technical products, but it should not be influencing how they present to the dev team. Otherwise they're just another even-less-accountable architecture astronaut.
Are their pay and their working conditions the best that the market can offer to them?
> - can they be responsible? Or have they bought into the fantasy where they offload responsibility to a “decider” while they play the role exclusively of “doer”?
Do they have the decision power and the salary that go hand in hand with high responsibility?