In my experience, POs are a glorified middle man with an unclear role that acts like a mini CEO and just stands in between developers and the outside world. In

In my experience, POs are a glorified middle man with an unclear role that acts like a mini CEO and just stands in between developers and the outside world. In their most useful, the best they can do is stay away and not bother the devs and learn as much about the product and how it works so they can appear useful in sessions with outside stakeholders. In their least useful they are a broken phone and nothing more than a ticket pusher and micromanager. I believe how this job was created, was that some business types wanted to have full control and overview over what the devs are doing, so they created a position where they can embed one of their own, to give them a piece of mind that one of them is in control of what devs are doing. The job requires lots of talking, status reports, and ticket creation. It's basically a receptionist but with made up significance and influence disproportionate to experience or reason. The PO is basically inversion of control: let's select the guy with the least hand on experience of building something, least hands on experience in the problems of the product, and make them call all the shots on what gets built and when, ignoring the devs, cause how they can possibly know, they are code monkeys.