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.
