15
lorless
1y

Joined a new team at work 6 months ago. Immediately set upon by a useless PO who was somehow set in her ways while still being around 30 years old. Absolutely refused to change the broken team dynamic or processes in any way whatsoever. Made terrible tickets, never did refinement on tickets so they were always missing stuff and constantly blocked. Generally unlikeable and difficult to work with, incompetent at her job and resolutely refused to change literally anything to make the team function better.

She finally leaves after 6 months and the team dynamic changes immediately. Suddenly we are improving our processes, getting stakeholder input, refining tickets, taking reasonable amounts of work in a sprint. We have discussions without her butting in and getting frustrated when you bring up legitimate concerns. No longer do you have to tiptoe around and appease her ego if you want to point out the obvious flaws in the work she drew up or even just examine it from a technical perspective.

It's insane how much things can improve once you shed the dead weight of people that are just determined to be difficult and won't budge an inch to change their ways. Good riddance.

Comments
  • 4
    The thing is that this type of persons think that they are perfectly fine the way they are and don't feel the need to change. No matter how many valid logical reasons you throw at them in most of the cases they wont change their opinion/way of doing things... probably just not to look stupid in the eyes of the others, not realizing that this behavior makes them look even stupidier. One must own his mistakes and learn from them and in the best scenario learn from the mistakes of the others too :)
  • 2
    In my opinion if a person affects other people negativ on that level, they have a psychic problem. That cant be a bad character, they literally work against the team/company.

    We3D describes it perfectly. Its all about the show.

    @lorless Why did she leave?
  • 1
    The more the position requires to give direction the harder it becomes to work around it. Dead weight junior engineer can also be a hassle but PO is devastating. My previous team also had an asshole of a PO. Even though he is not as incompetent as yours, he managed to work the team into very unhappy silos at a breaking point.
  • 1
    @hjk101 yeah, If you don't have what it takes for the role you are playing in a team you can try at least not to do much harm to the project and the involved people in it and at best learn and earn the title you r wearing ar the moment
Add Comment