u/graphy333

Hey guys,

I'm product owner (with CSPO cert.) I've just landed a new job in certain mid-size company in SEA for 6 months, I'm about 8 years into my product career. On paper we run scrum BUT:

1. No Scrum Master, the PO (me) runs all the ceremonies, you name it: planning, refinement, retrospectives, do scrumpoker even.
2. No business analyst. I write detailed PRDs, talk to stakeholders, users, spinup jira tickets and PBIs.
3. No system analyst. Dev lead designs architecture together with other devs.
4. No QA person. I once raised question to management "Devs test their own stuff, that's how it's always been here." ; always ended up with I do testing and with a lot of bugs in user journeys.
5. No SRE rehire, one last infra guy left and was never backfilled, so outages land on the backend engineers and no one know the rootcause once the incident hit (temporary they said; but already 3 months long)
6. "Data-driven company"... except there's no data engineer, the pipeline is ancient maze, and when tracking breaks the question is somehow "why PO missing data tracking"
7. And every month I hand-run BigQuery MCP to assemble the revenue report for finance. Pretty sure that was never in a PO job description but here we are.

I saw stories where scrummaster roles disappearing and getting absorbed into the PO. That matches what I'm living...
Except it's not just the SM role, it's every role the org never hired or rehired. A fresh-grad PO would not survive this setup; you only cope by having seen enough org to improvise.

Genuine questions:

Is this the norm outside the big-tech bubble? If your org runs "scrum" with half the roles missing,

How do you keep the PO from becoming the org's shock absorber?

Has anyone actually pushed back on this and won?