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The Subject Matter Expert Product Owner
The Subject Matter Expert or SME is the expert in telling you how stuff works. Product Owners that favor this stance are a blessing and a curse. When you bring relevant domain knowledge to the Scrum Team, they can make more informed decisions and create a better plan to achieve (Sprint) Goals.
It can also lead to a single point of knowledge, and rather than taking the stance of the Story Writer and forgoing discussion, this stance manifests itself as micro-management and spoon-feeding the development team. In many organizations, it seems to be expected that the Product Owner is also the Subject Matter Expert.
Is the Business World Really Serious About Upskilling?
We live in peculiar times whereby organizations frequently grumble about skills shortages, individuals struggle to adapt to the changing needs of the labor market, and policymakers fret about people being left behind by the pace of technological change. It’s an environment in which one would imagine investment in upskilling would be booming, and yet with employee tenure slumping, the opposite appears to be the case, especially for small to medium-size enterprises (SME) that make up the bulk of the workforce.
A recent from Adecco set out to get a better understanding of the skills landscape and explore how society can get better at helping people to get the skills they need to thrive, especially if they work in the SME sector.
Be The SME
I’m kicking off a new series of blog posts based on the Seven Strategies sections in my book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software. The next seven blog posts will each be based on a different strategy from the section in my book called on Seven Strategies for Product Owners. You can also see the original blog post .
SME stands for subject matter expert, the people who understand the domain that we’re building software within. These people have specialized knowledge and we want to find ways to incorporate that knowledge into the software we’re building.