r/ProductOwner

Every team I've worked with has the same problem.

The answer you're looking for usually exists somewhere...

• Slack thread
• GitHub PR
• Jira ticket
• Meeting notes
• Google Docs

But finding the full context later feels like a treasure hunt.

I'm thinking about building something that connects all of these and lets you ask questions in plain English instead of searching across multiple tools.

Before I spend more time on it, I wanted to ask:

• Is this actually a problem for your team?
• How do you deal with it today?
• What would make you switch from your current workflow?

I'd really appreciate honest feedback—even if you think it's a bad idea.

You need help getting your backlog in Jira or Azure DevOps organized and in a form that helps your planning and delivery. I need help testing a new AI Map Builder feature that gets your backlog organized quickly!

What's the catch? There is no catch. There is no cost. I won't see your backlog. The AI Map Builder is part of my web application that runs in your browser, using your computer and your memory. I'll give you free access to it for 30 days. You download your backlog from your Jira or ADO project into the tool (it's a copy) and then run the AI Map Builder. No risk to what you have, because you have to decide to upload it... I'll let you save it but you have to request the ability to upload it back into your tool. Enabling it is free, but by having to ask it's an additional step. You will be able to save the organized backlog to your local computer.

What do you get? A well-organized backlog that gives you a defined path to rapid delivery. I will help you get there, gratis. I'll even throw in some free consulting if you are stuck (not just on your backlog, on anything software project-related). That's how I'm helping you for helping me.

What I would like to get from you is feedback. Let me know what you think. Let me know where it needs to be improved. IF you like the results, you could always say something nice about me and/or the product. Is that too much to ask?

There is one catch: I only want up to 10 people, simply because I cannot support more and give you the attention you might need. So, this is open to the first 10 people who reach out... DM me if you're interested.

Mods, not trying to sell something, trying to test something and am willing to give in order to get.

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Edited to add:

Re security concerns for those worried about exposing IP to an LLM, the AI implementation here is bring-your-own-key (BYOK). You will configure the tool to support your AI service provider of choice. The tool supports multiple AI providers whether they use the OpenAI or Anthropic APIs. You can use your own private instance of OpenAI, Copilot, or Anthropic, your own hosted LLMs (I've used the Gemma 4 models hosted on my own Mac via vMLX), etc. So, it is as secure as your own AI service provider because it IS your own AI service provider. I'm not in the business of selling AI services or tokens.

Also, no data is stored on my servers... the downloaded backlog is stored in your browser storage and is wiped when you clear it. You can store downloaded backlogs on your file system, or re-upload them back to your tool. Another design choice to eliminate data privacy and security concerns.

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I have 10 years of experience as a DBA (AWS, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, cloud infrastructure, automation, and production support). I've started feeling bored with the DBA role and have an opportunity to move internally to a Technical Product Owner (TPO) position.

My long-term goal is to move into a managerial/leadership role and eventually relocate to the US. I'm trying to decide whether switching to TPO now is the right step or whether I should continue growing in the DBA/Infrastructure path.

For people who have made this transition (or considered it):

Was it worth it?

Does TPO offer better long-term growth than senior DBA roles?

Which path has better opportunities for leadership and US-based roles?

Looking back, would you make the same decision again?

I'd appreciate honest experiences rather than generic career advice.

I'm working on a project to make the international job search easier, especially for people looking for visa-sponsored opportunities.

Before building further, I'd like to understand what people actually struggle with.

Some questions I'm curious about:

• Did you struggle to find companies that actually sponsor visas?
• Was it difficult to understand visa requirements?
• Did you waste time applying to companies that couldn't sponsor you?
• What tools or websites did you rely on?

I'd really appreciate hearing about your experience. Real stories are much more valuable than feature requests.

Every team I've worked with has thousands of Slack messages, GitHub PRs, docs, meeting notes, and tickets.

The information exists.

But finding the reason behind a decision is surprisingly difficult.

A new engineer asks,
"Why did we build it this way?"

Someone replies,
"I remember discussing it... somewhere."

Then begins the 30-minute hunt across Slack, GitHub, Notion, Jira, and Google Docs.

It feels like companies don't have an information problem.

They have a memory problem.

I'm curious:

• How does your team preserve important decisions?
• What breaks as your company grows?
• Have you found anything that actually works?

I'm exploring this problem and would love to hear real experiences.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to transition into a Product Owner role and would appreciate some advice.

My background is in Technical Project Management at a large tech company, where I work between business and engineering. My responsibilities include requirements engineering, stakeholder management, Jira/User Stories, process optimization, and evaluating AI/LLM-based solutions. I also hold a PSPO I and a CAS in Agile Requirements Engineering.

My challenge is that I don't have the official "Product Owner" title, although many of my responsibilities overlap with the role.

A few questions:

- What skills are most important to become a strong Product Owner today?

- How much does actual PO experience matter compared to transferable experience?

- How important are AI skills (LLMs, AI agents, AI-assisted product development) becoming?

- If you were hiring, what would make a candidate like me stand out?

- What would you focus on over the next year to bridge the gap?

Thanks in advance.

Managing the product backlog and roadmap has been a bit of a nightmare for me lately. im constantly juggling tasks, prioritizing new features, and tracking changes, but no matter what i try, things seem to slip through the cracks. ive been using basic tools like spreadsheets, but they just dont feel like enough when the list of tasks grows.

What im really struggling with is how to visualize everything clearly so the whole team can stay on the same page. its hard to track progress and adjust things when everythings all over the place.

How do you manage your product backlog and keep things organized without losing sight of the bigger picture?

TLDR: I suspect the all-in-one solution is too good to be true, but I don't have the bandwidth to test extensively enough to prove it 🤷‍♂️

Hi folks, I manage a team of project/product managers at a small creative agency where we have struggled for years against lack of business infrastructure - sales, quoting, resource planning, finance are all largely vibe-based outside my own spreadsheets. Leadership is finally agreeing to move on this but seems to have zeroed in on Scoro as an all-in-one solution. Their plan is to replace our only two functioning systems (Jira + Harvest for time tracking and budges) with Scoro, which sounds great in theory but has triggered my "this is going to backfire" spidey sense. I am frankly a little concerned that it seems difficult to integrate with other platforms and, candidly, the fact that I have never heard about it in the wild. The last time I encountered a platform like this (Teamwork) it turned out to be clunky and more of a friction to work than an optimizer. Great on paper, but slow and tedious in day-to-day reality.

In the testing I've done so far, it seems like it would be a pain to work in day-to-day as a PM, let alone a specialist. BUT I'm also open to the possibility that I'm just set in my ways. Other options in consideration: Productive.io and Jira + Tempo apps.

Any thoughts or feedback? I'm not a bot or a marketing staffer, genuinely just a haggard PM worried I'm about to watch my team get dragged into yet another avoidable tooling headache.

I’m trying to understand how the industry describes teams like mine.

Our long-term mission is to enable external developers and AI agents to successfully discover, integrate with and consume our company’s external APIs on our dev portal.

Today, our primary customers are internal engineering teams. We help them build high-quality external APIs by providing reusable products and capabilities such as:
* Reference implementations
* Code generation
* Shared platform capabilities (authentication, observability, etc.)
* AI guidance for API design decisions

We don’t own the business APIs themselves. Instead, we improve the experience of building them so that external developers and AI agents have a consistent, reliable API experience.

The vision is create an external API platform where every external API is consistent, discoverable and easy for both humans and AI agents to consume.

What would you call this type of team in your organization?
Is this Platform Engineering, Developer Experience (DevEx), Internal Developer Platform (IDP), API Platform, Engineering Enablement, or something else?

View Poll

Hi everyone,

I’m 24M, and my career path has been a bit strange, so I’d really appreciate some advice.

I was hired as a Junior Software Engineer about two years ago. However, in my company, most of the architecture and coding work is handled by external vendors. Because of that, I don’t actually write much code, and I feel like my technical/coding skills haven’t grown much.

Because of my current responsibilities, I’ve been thinking about shifting my career path toward Product Owner/Product Manager roles. It seems more aligned with what I’m already doing, and it might also help me prepare for moving to another company in the future.

Right now, my responsibilities include:

• Designing and reviewing system flows and business logic
• Writing documentation, system designs, pseudocode, SQL, etc.
• Managing the backlog, recording issues, and translating business requirements for the development team
• Having daily meetings with the vendor development team’s project manager to align on tickets, releases, and priorities
• Handling UAT testing and supporting project rollouts across multiple new regions

Because of this, I have a few questions:

• Apart from communication skills, what skill sets are considered essential for a Product Manager across different companies?
• How can I develop those skills within my current responsibilities, or how can I improve them on my own?
• Are certifications necessary to get a PM/PO job, or is relevant work experience usually enough?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hello, I am someone with a 6+ years of experience in software testing and backend. I am currently trying to pivot away from coding and looking into positions like Product Owner. I see CSPO certification being brought up as a way to stand out in applications, however it is not a free course. While 400 is not exactly breaking the bank, I would love to know if anyone here has any experience with this certification or whether it actually helps in getting interviews and landing the position. There are other certifications as well like PSPO, so I would appreciate any advice on this.

Some more background if needed: B1 German, Masters from Germany and work ex all in Germany as well.

our PM and eng lead got into it during backlog grooming over whether SSO/SAML was a top-3 customer ask.

he had pulled the data from Productboard, which aggregates the support ticket themes, i had pulled mine from BuildBetter, which sits over our win-loss interview themes, both technically right but the ranked lists came out completely different.

our roadmap process is basically each function arguing for their own siloed data set, dressed up as customer-led planning, and we're all looking at a different picture so the loudest opinion wins by default.

haven't figured out the tiebreaker yet and the next quarter is shaping up to be a vibes contest.

thoughts?

I am 37F and have 13+ years of experience in QA manual + automation. Since 2024 I took break but now I want to resume into product management. I want to ask current working PO or PM how their day look like and if remote work is possible. I am opting for PSPO for start any guidance would be helpful

Not gonna lie, job hunting is starting to feel like a full-time job.

A few months ago, I decided to transition into Product Management

.

I thought the hard part would be learning product thinking, user research, prioritization, metrics, and all the other PM concepts.

Turns out, the harder part is getting someone to give you a chance.

Over the last few months, I've completed the NextLeap Product Management Fellowship, worked on product case studies, built projects, updated my portfolio more times than I can count, and spent countless hours applying for roles.

Some days it feels productive.

Some days it feels like:

Apply → Wait → Rejected → Repeat.

I'm currently looking for Product Intern, Associate Product Manager, Product Analyst, or Product Operations opportunities.

If you're hiring, know someone who's hiring, or can point me in the right direction, I'd genuinely appreciate it.

And if you're also trying to break into product right now, I'd love to connect. It's always good to know you're not the only one figuring things out.

I’ve been seeing a huge debate lately around how much technical knowledge a PM actually needs versus their soft skills.

On paper, job descriptions love to demand a CS background, data analytics, and deep architecture knowledge. But in reality, it feels like you can learn intermediate SQL, how to read an API doc, or how to navigate Mixpanel/GA4 on the go, over a few weekends. Hard skills have a clear syllabus.

On the flip side, things like leading an engineering team without actual authority, saying "no" to aggressive stakeholders without burning bridges, and translating chaotic requirements into clarity feel impossible to teach via a textbook.

For the PMs here:

• How much of the "technical" side did you actually have to know on day one, vs. what you just picked up on the job?
• If you had to pick, are elite soft skills significantly more important than technical skills for long-term PM success?

Would love to hear from both technical and non-technical PMs on where the actual bottleneck is.

I’ve seen a lot of people lately saying requirements management is becoming “just throw a prompt into Claude Code” or that requirements are so vague engineers end up figuring things out as they build.

As a CS student who’s been trying to learn more about product management, I’m curious how this actually works in practice.

When requirements are vague or constantly changing, how do you usually manage them? Do you keep everything in Jira, Confluence, Notion, PRDs, or somewhere else? How much back-and-forth happens before engineering starts building?
I’m mainly interested in hearing how experienced PMs keep everyone aligned when requirements aren’t crystal clear.

Been talking to a lot of people in the PM/PO/BA job market lately and everyone seems stuck at a different stage. Some can't get interview calls at all. Some get the calls but go quiet after a round or two. And a lot of folks switching from another domain are struggling to actually crack the interviews.

Curious where most of you are stuck right now. What's been the more painful part for you, getting the calls or clearing the interviews? And have you found anything that actually helped fix it, or are you still struggling with it?

I want to transition to Product management and I am looking for structured way to read, study and then eventually create projects. However, at this point of time I am not in a position to purchase any course financial life sucks(working as a cx service agent also sucks). Please do let me know if anyone who has already graduated from any of the PM course willing to share their access. I assure you of no mis-use and rather once I transition I will come and thank you.

Very wired and hyperfocused on my first PM role

1st job as a PO/PM, previously used to work as a dev who also performed PO functions.

I am a month in. Very hyped up and Im working basically 14 hour days from 7am till 9pm for the past 4 weeks.

There is an overlap with devs during the midday and a late evening overlap with clients.

There are ups and downs, but I in general I love the challenge, gathering requirements, making decisions, pushing things to go faster, removing bottlenecks and in general helping my team out to be as efficient as possible and making sure we are on the right track, we are in sync and etc. I am nearly addicted to this job because it pays amazingly well and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I'm where I need to be - able to use my full potential and etc. And I'm learning a ton of valuable experience.

I cant turn it off. Even when I'm away from PC I'm thinking about how to push things through. I used to own my own busines few years ago where I owned a few online gaming products and it reminds me of those times. The rush the risk management and so on. But without risking my own pocket this time. Perhaps this job is pulling me out of depression, in which I was for atleast 1.5 years.

We have milestones for july, august and september where our system is gonna get live tested during sales. I have something to look forward to.

I'm trying to limit my worktime, being more efficient and find some balance again, because I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn out soon if I keep this up. Problem is, nothing else in my life atm gives me dopamine, even though I have a partner with whom we are getting married after 5 weeks, lol.

How to find some balance?