Main idea

We discuss a role by looking at what the person holding it does: their skills, their diligence, their daily added value. That discussion misses the main piece of information. Creating the Product Owner role assumes you have already settled that it is possible to separate the part held to be noble — thinking the product, carrying a vision, arbitrating — from the part you delegate: keeping the backlog, holding the relationship with the developers, watching the release.

An org chart is therefore a series of hypotheses about what can be cut without loss. These hypotheses are never stated, but they are executed every day. Judging a role amounts to judging the cut line that gave birth to it, not the excellence of whoever occupies it.

Why it matters

This separates two critiques that are constantly conflated: faulting people for their work, and contesting a division they are subjected to. The second doesn't imply the first.

And it indicates where a reorganization should bear: re-cut, don't replace. Recruiting someone better into a badly cut role fixes nothing.

Nuances and limits

Not every cut line is ideological. Some come from a material constraint — headcount, a time zone, a regulatory requirement — and say nothing about what the organization believes to be separable.

And the hypothesis may be sound: separating level 1 support from development works in many teams. The existence of the role raises the question, it doesn't settle it.

Open questions

• How can an organization make explicit the separability hypothesis it applies, at the moment it opens a role rather than years later?