The article and commenter are talking about a single management role, Product. You say “retain managers” — plural. You’re putting words in their mouth.

They had something like Extreme Programming, and it was not a good time from what I heard. If you want to live in la la land of coding for a profitable business, well, sorry to break it to you, but a cohort of smart people need to be led. Notice I said led, not managed.

Also, the role is called Product Owner not Product Manager, I would imagine that was a conscious choice. If a PO feels like a manager, that’s what’s wrong. And maybe why that could be is the engineering team’s fault for having an insatiable need to.. control all aspects of their day-to-day. However, it’s a business at the end of the day, not a coding playground.

The article is basically suggesting POs shouldn’t control the backlog because engineers know better (essentially). Sounds like they’ve had a bad experience and want to vent about it. Fine, but it’s an immature take imho.

I am an engineer myself and I think it’s insulting to the people who have to take the work that engineers do (or fail to do because they want to experiment) and cross the divide and tell the business that the work you’ve done is worth everyone’s salary.

I don’t want to control the backlog with a bunch of other knuckleheads, thanks.