Main idea

Contesting the separation between design and delivery doesn't require removing the role that embodies it. A team working on regulated healthcare software, with a legacy codebase, kept its Product Owner and redistributed the content of the role: the developer carries part of the product vision, the Product Owner designs. The people stay, the dividing line moves.

This is an outcome distinct from removal, and often the only practicable one: in a domain constrained by regulation and by technical legacy, the knowledge accumulated by the role's holders is worth more than the purity of the split.

What becomes indefensible is the transmission belt — the function that consists in passing information from one side to the other — not the people nor the seat they occupy.

Why it matters

This makes a critique of a split applicable: it leads to a redistribution of responsibilities, whose social cost is low, rather than to cutting roles.

And it provides an observable success criterion: after redistribution, every decision must have a holder who will see its consequences, whatever their title.

Nuances and limits

Redistribution can be merely nominal: if the developer receives a share of product vision without the time or the mandate to arbitrate, the transmission belt survives under another name.

And an organization can redistribute so finely that nobody holds the whole any more, which recreates by dispersion the responsibility problem it was trying to solve.

Open questions

• What sign distinguishes a real redistribution from window dressing, six months after deciding it?