Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about SAFe and the product owner role | Melissa Perri

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

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

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

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

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

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. If you embrace those principles, you're going to do well

If you are one of those people who's been pushing the boundaries, doing great work, and your title is a product owner, what I always tell people on your resume, if you're looking for your next job... talk about what value you brought to the users and what metrics you moved. And that's how your resume should be laid out

When I see product owners right out there, there are resumes or describe their job functions, they always approach it from a process standpoint. I prioritize the backlog. I worked with the developers to break down the work. I checked the developer's work and did the acceptance criteria. I wrote the user stories. All those functions is what I see over and over and over again in product owner resume

If you want to transition into tech and go into the companies that we talk about, they're probably going to look at that and say, this person doesn't know what they're doing, right, like this is not here. So if you do know what you're doing, and you did that for a reason, because some people need that to get promoted, some companies actually require it, which is crazy

So you would have all product managers on a team would either be an IC, right? It's an individual contributor. So they're either an associate product manager and that's if they don't have all the discovery experience or maybe they know basic scrum, totally fine. You can make an associate product manager. But if they don't know how to talk to customers, digest what the customers are saying and turn that into a feature direction and a backlog and this is how we're gonna work, all that stuff needs to be in there, right?

But I would not confuse people with the two different titles of product owner versus product manager

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

The premise of this is when we talk about Scrum, it's just one piece of the puzzle. When people talk about agile now, they almost always associate it with Scrum. I was actually googling agile methodologies. Like I said, the other ones, Convons and agile methodology, XP is an agile methodology. They don't have product donors

A lot of large companies turn to Scrum or to the frameworks and it's because they traditionally didn't grow up building software. So they're looking at how do I implement something that has rigor at scale? And that's where you see a lot of Scrum come up

If you're not doing that, that's where I think things like a framework help. But if you already are doing that, you don't need a framework, right? Like, you don't need Scrum. You don't need to be prescribed to this two-week sprint or anything like that

A lot of the developers complain, a lot of product managers complain that Scrum has too many meetings and they don't actually get to do work. And that's where I think you have to go back to the inspect and adapt part

I think what safe does is it gives you the illusion that you've got a process that's solving your problems, when in reality you haven't fixed the underlying issues around product strategy, customer value, or how teams are actually enabled to build the right thing

Safe is not good at describing how you do all that other work. So in a lot of this stuff too, they started putting on, there's like pieces that they put onto this map of safe where they're like, hey, you should do OKRs. And it's like, this is what OKRs are. You should do a road map, this is what a road map is. But like how all of that cycle kind of works together where you're balancing discovery and delivery and feeding it in, it's really confusing in organizations

The problem is, it's only solving a little bit of the puzzle, which is bringing those teams together. And people do say it does really strain as well. But it doesn't tell you also how to do your job as a leader. It leaves it all out

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.

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

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

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?