A letter from a fake Product Owner

From:

The Ivory Tower

(far far away from the Gemba)

18th October 2019

To Whomsoever It May Concern

Dearies,

Sigh, where do I begin? I write this letter to express my deep frustration about the lack of understanding within the public at large about how important (‘super critical’ is the right term) my job is.

Let me tell you a little bit about my journey, so that you know what I am talking about.

Ages ago, when I graduated from college, I excitedly joined the IT division of this organization as an ‘IT Business Analyst’. The role and the work were nicely cut out — I would engage with business teams to gather requirements, document them, get business to sign-off on them, and pass them on to the developers. Once the sign-off was received, I was free to move on to other projects, or go back to my BA pool. Sometimes I was contacted by old project teams (from whom I had happily moved-on) whenever some defects were categorized as ‘requirements miss’. I would fight with all my power to get those defects re-categorized as ‘design miss’ or ‘development miss’ (or whatever else ‘miss’), as long as it was not blamed on me. You know how all these developers/testers try to pass on their faults on us, right? You need to…