Product owner overpromises new features while developers watch in horrified silence

Description

Meme constructed from a famous Oval Office photo: a suited man (face blurred) sits at a desk turning toward an older woman (face blurred) who stands with clasped hands and a concerned posture. White bold captions label the seated man at bottom-left: "PRODUCT OWNER PROMISING THE CLIENT NEW FEATURES WITHIN DAYS" and the standing woman at center-right: "THE DEVELOPERS". The visual conveys an executive cheerfully making commitments while the development team reacts with visible unease. Technically, it lampoons Scrum dynamics where a product owner commits to external stakeholders without consulting sprint capacity, leading to unrealistic timelines, scope creep, and release pressure for engineers

Common Tags

DeveloperMemes DeveloperHumor UnrealisticDeadlines AgilePainPoints DeveloperFrustration ProductManagement StakeholderExpectations ScopeCreep

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick “Sure, we’ll deliver those ‘couple of features’ this week - right after I finish retrofitting the event-sourced, eventually-consistent, globally distributed monolith you signed off on last quarter.”

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

“Sure, we’ll deliver those ‘couple of features’ this week - right after I finish retrofitting the event-sourced, eventually-consistent, globally distributed monolith you signed off on last quarter.”
Anonymous

After 20 years in tech, you learn that 'within days' in product-speak translates to 'several sprints, three architecture reviews, two security audits, and a complete rewrite of the legacy integration layer we discovered halfway through' - but sure, let's tell the client it's just a quick config change
Anonymous

When the Product Owner commits to 'just a few quick features' in the client meeting without checking if the team is still recovering from the last 'quick win' that required refactoring three microservices, migrating the database schema, and somehow making it backward compatible with the legacy monolith that nobody dares touch
Anonymous

PO promised delivery in days; our Kanban says P95 is 21, so yes - days, just not contiguous ones
Anonymous

PO: 'Days.' Devs: *eyes Jira backlog* 'That's cute - hold my energy drink.'
Anonymous

When product promises “days,” but your queue depth says Little’s Law will see you in Q2
@DenDrobiazko 1y

This is true. I've worked on a team for a customer from Saudi Arabia - we hated our PMs because this happened every f...ing time
@SamsonovAnton 1y

Next level: the head of our sales & marketing department usually starts selling a feature the very same day he hears about theoretical possibility to implement it within an foreseeable time frame, — as if the feature was implemented already.