Lenny's Podcast: Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about SAFe and the product owner role | Melissa Perri

☑ The Product Owner Role Is Misunderstood
▪️ Product owners weren’t originally designed to do end-to-end product management.
▪️ The role emerged as a support for developers to prioritise, not for managing entire product strategies.
▪️ Companies implementing SAFe often burden product owners with tactical tasks, missing out on true product management.

☑ Why “Plug-and-Play” Approaches Like SAFe Don’t Work
▪️ Companies often buy into SAFe for a pre-set process. It seems simple, but oversimplifies agile.
▪️ This results in excessive meetings, rigid planning, and focus on “filling backlogs” over delivering value.
▪️ Successful organisations often end up modifying SAFe, focusing on discovery and aligning product goals with strategy.

☑ The Key to Transformation? Skilled Product Leaders, Not Frameworks
▪️ Effective product leadership isn’t about enforcing methodologies—it’s about connecting product work to the company’s vision and customer needs.
▪️ Companies that have succeeded in digital transformation invested in experienced product managers and embedded agile coaches—not more processes.
▪️ Adapting frameworks to fit the organisation (instead of following a rigid structure) is critical.

Actionable Insights for Agile Transformation Success
▪️ Hire Product Managers with Strategic Experience. Bring in skilled product managers who can drive customer-focused outcomes, not just backlog management. Ensure they know how to conduct market research, customer interviews, and strategy development.

▪️Keep Processes Flexible and Focus on Value. Use frameworks like Scrum and SAFe as guides, not strict rulebooks. Assess each part: is it helping your team deliver value? If not, adapt or drop it.

▪️Prioritise Discovery Time Over Endless Meetings. Make sure product managers have dedicated time to engage in discovery work—talking to customers, researching market needs, and validating assumptions—not just filling backlogs.

I do not recommend using safe. There are people who found success with safe. Every single person I have talked to who likes safe, found success with safe, they ended up ripping it up and making it into something else.

The product owner role did not emerge from product management as we know it today. It was a way to help the developers prioritize what to work on

If you're a small startup, I don't think you need a lot of this overhead. It's really designed for larger scale companies.

A lot of developers complain, a lot of product managers complain that Scrum has too many meetings and they don't actually get to do work

SAFE is not actually SAFE by the book. If you ended up adopting SAFE and want to get rid of all the stuff that's not working and keep the stuff that is, fine

SAFE's really good at prescribing how to do release trains... but it doesn't tell you how to do your job as a leader

A lot of leaders argue with me that we need product owners because it just doesn't scale. I've seen massive companies at scale where they don't have any product owners. It's a weak argument to me that we need product owners because it just doesn't scale

When you look at Agile methodologies, what we're really saying there is we want to be able to move quickly and deliver great value to customers

It's not just a transformation project. This is a whole new way of working. And if we want a whole new way of working, we have to really rise to that occasion

Executives buy SAFE because it's the only framework out there that basically draws them a map and says, 'Plug and play, do this.'

If you want to move into product management, get out of the Agile cadences. Instead, talk about what value you brought to the users and what metrics you moved

You can become very big. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix—no company you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner

If you take SAFE too far, it will destroy things. Companies end up talking about work about work, but not actually getting into what are we achieving here

A lot of people are wedded to 'this is SAFE and you will do it by the book,' and I'd be very skeptical of that

Inspect and adapt is a lowercase Agile principle. We should be looking at every process we do and saying, 'Is it working?' and not be afraid to change it

You bring in the right person, you can make amazing product managers. Like, give them a year or two and completely turn it around. So it's totally possible. It's totally possible to take people and train them. And I firmly believe in that. but you got to get them exposure to what good looks like. And if you are in an organization and you cannot see what good looks like anywhere, that's a red flag, right?

To be successful, companies need to see software strategies and digital strategies intertwined into their company's long-term goals