Nov 10, 2024 · 1h 24m · lennys-podcast
Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about SAFe and the product owner role | Melissa Perri
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Product management expert Melissa Perri joins Lenny Rachitsky to demystify the surging demand for product owners, critique rigid frameworks like SAFe, and outline how enterprises can transition to outcome-driven product operating models.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 16% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.2 Guest teaching 5.2 Guest disagreement 1.9 Lenny pushing back 0.6
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:06:45 Tearing down the agile certification industrial complex
Melissa passionately attacks certification mills and short courses that sell the false promise that a two-day workshop qualifies someone to do product management.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 21:59 Challenging the need for Scrum frameworksLenny pushes back on enterprise methodologies, questioning why any team with great developers and PMs would ever need rigid Scrum or scaling frameworks.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 13:30 The historical omission in Scrum guide revisionsMelissa reveals that early Scrum guides allowed product managers to be product owners, but later revisions dropped this nuance, creating a decade of industry role confusion.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 1:02:11 Citing tech industry data on product owner absenceLenny brings his own empirical research to bear, pointing out that not a single premier Silicon Valley tech giant uses the product owner job title.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Surging Demand for Product Owners in Tech Job Market | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Lenny sets the stage with data he discovered regarding product owner job growth while admitting he personally never hired or worked with one. Melissa enthusiastically agrees to dive into the topic. | |
| Sponsor Segment: One Schema Integration Platform | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Sponsor read and introductory context with Christina Gilbert from One Schema. | |
| History of Agile, Scrum, and Role Definitions | 2 | 8 | 2 | 0 | Melissa delivers a detailed masterclass on the history of the Agile Manifesto, Scrum guides, and how the product owner role emerged solely to feed developer backlogs rather than doing true product management. | |
| Comparing Enterprise Framework Adoption to Startup Working Methods | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Lenny asks a pointed higher-level question contrasting startup culture with enterprise frameworks. Melissa explains why enterprises adopt rigid Scrum compared to flexible startups. | |
| Deep Dive into SAFe and Role Splitting | 3 | 8 | 3 | 0 | Melissa explains the mechanics of SAFe, release trains, and the artificial divide created between strategic product managers and tactical product owners trapped in 40-hour user story writing. | |
| The Flaws and Enterprise Appeal of SAFe | 4 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Lenny notes the absurdity of the SAFe framework diagram and asks why companies still adopt it. Melissa articulates how executives buy it as an out-of-the-box handbook despite its high failure rate. | |
| Building a Sustainable Product Operating Model and Transformation | 3 | 7 | 3 | 0 | Melissa details how to design an actual product operating model, criticizing top-down transformations run by middle managers without proper C-suite strategy or career ladders. | |
| Sponsor Segment: Coda All-in-One Collaborative Workspace | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Sponsor advertisement for Coda. | |
| The Need for Experienced Product Leaders and Continuous Learning | 4 | 6 | 3 | 1 | Melissa strongly denounces SAFe by citing the Dutch water company bankruptcy and highlights the necessity of experienced product leaders over dogmatic process checklists. | |
| Actionable Advice for Product Owners Wanting Strategic Growth | 3 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Melissa provides concrete advice for product owners feeling stuck, encouraging them to ask strategic outcome-oriented questions and push back against pure backlog grooming. | |
| Crafting Resumes for PM Value vs. The Certification Trap | 6 | 6 | 4 | 2 | Lenny notes that top tech firms have zero product owners. Melissa strongly critiques the agile certification industrial complex (CSPO) and explains how to frame resume bullets around value. | |
| Eliminating the Product Owner Title and the Athenahealth Case Study | 4 | 7 | 1 | 2 | Lenny asks whether the product owner title should be eliminated entirely. Melissa offers a nuanced view using the Athenahealth case study where baselining skills led some PMs to choose other functional roles. | |
| Core Agile Principles vs. Big Consulting and C-Suite Strategy | 4 | 6 | 3 | 0 | Melissa warns against hiring big consulting firms like McKinsey who push cookie-cutter agile transformations, emphasizing lowercase agile principles and executive-level software strategy. |
Statements from this episode (18)
Rachitsky: Product owner is the third-fastest-growing US tech role
“The product owner role was the third fastest growing role in tech. And this was just in the U S the data I was looking at, but I think it's probably true broadly.”
Perri: Capital One Succeeded by Adding Product Management to Agile
“Capital One is a great example that took their agile transformation and started adding product management on it. And they really turned that around in the card business.”
Perri: No product managers wrote the original Agile Manifesto
“Nobody was a product manager who went to that meeting, right? Nobody who wrote the Agile Manifesto was actually a product manager.”
Perri: Product owner certifications omit essential skills like research and data
“When people get trained to be a product owner, it's usually a two-day class where they teach them, hey, this is how you break down a backlog. This is how you do stand-ups with your teams. This is how you think about prioritizing work. This is how you manage yo…”
Perri: SAFe turns product owners into tactical order takers
“What I've seen that doesn't work here is that you are basically making these product owners order takers. They are extremely tactical.”
Perri: Capital One eliminated all Agile and Scrum roles
“Capital One just came out and said they got rid of all their Agile roles, all their Scrum roles. They were an early adopter of safe. They don't do it anymore.”
Perri: Executives buy SAFe because it is the only plug-and-play framework
“Executives buy SAFE because it is the only framework out there that basically draws them a map and says, plug and play, do this. And that's why everybody's so excited about it because it's the only thing that specifies things to this level.”
Perri: Enterprise adoption of SAFe is not slowing down
“I have not seen SAFE slowing down by any means out there for people adopting it. I see more and more organizations adopting it.”
Perri: SAFe fails because it ignores product discovery and value connection
“And that's what I think SAFE was trying to do, but it's not working because it's not solving the problems of the product management, and it's not solving that problem of connecting the value Back to the product teams. Instead, it's seen as a role that almost l…”
Perri: Middle-manager-led transformations fail because their jobs are at risk
“I've seen it run by a lot of middle managers, like a transformation run by tons of middle managers. And those are the jobs that are usually in most jeopardy when you start transforming and you have to reskill and you have to figure out what to do. And they don…”
Perri: Everyone successful with SAFe ripped it up and altered it
“Every single person I have talked to Who like safe found success with safe. They ended up ripping it up and making it into something else. So I'm like, it's not actually safe by the book.”
Perri: A Dutch water company went bankrupt adopting SAFe
“There's actually a great story about a water company in the Netherlands, right? And they decided to adopt safe. And this is, this was on the news like a couple months ago. They decided to adopt safe in their IT teams and start working with it. And they're they…”
Perri: All product owners should fundamentally be product managers
“Take Scrum away. You still need product management, right? Like product owner doesn't exist without Scrum. That's not a thing, but you still need product managers. And that's why all product owners should be product managers. They should be fundamentally produ…”
Rachitsky: Major tech companies hire product managers, not product owners
“Google has no product owners as far as they know. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, like no company you, you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner. They have, or they're all product managers. They're all product managers.”
Perri: Organizations should eliminate separate product owner and PM titles
“Get rid of these two different titles because it's confusing everybody. I've seen companies... I've seen companies with 47 different titles for product managers.”
Perri: Athenahealth retrained and consolidated 365 product managers
“When I did the transformation at Athena health, we had 365 product managers and they all had different, different titles to product innovation all over the place. So we turn them into product managers. We trained everybody.”
Perri: McKinsey created a division to introduce SAFe to enterprises
“McKinsey made a huge division to do this. And a lot of safe was actually introduced to organizations from McKinsey and from large organizations. Consulting organizations like that.”
Perri: McKinsey consultants selling agile transformations lack internal operational experience
“A lot of the people at McKinsey haven't done this before, right? They've never been inside the organization trying to transform it and stay there for a long time. And that's why I'd be really skeptical of who's selling that.”