Death of the Traditional Product Owner
And why that’s the best thing that could happen to your engineering organization
In the world OutcomeOps is building, the classic Product Owner role — as practiced by roughly 90% of Fortune 500 companies today — simply ceases to exist.
That sentence will make some people panic.
Good.
Panic is the sound of the future arriving faster than your org chart can handle.
"With GenAI, the implementation bottleneck is gone. The new bottleneck is intent, taste, and ownership."
They go on to describe a near-term future where engineers move from “writing code” to “shaping ambitious outcomes,” and where the old hand-off model collapses under its own weight.
Translation: the professional requirement-translator sitting between Business and Engineering is about to become the most endangered species in corporate America.
I’ve watched this movie before
- 2014 – I told a room full of ops leaders that containers would let developers deploy without them.
They heard: “You’re all getting fired.”
Reality: the best ops people became platform engineers and made 3× more money. - 2016 – I told the same room serverless would remove 80% of their runbooks.
They heard: “You’re obsolete.”
Reality: the best ones became architects of event-driven systems and got promoted. - 2025 – I’m telling you the traditional Product Owner role is next.
And the best ones are about to become the most valuable engineers on the planet.
The math is brutal
- Average Fortune 500 feature: 12–18 hand-offs from idea to production
- Average latency added by each hand-off: 3–7 days
- Average value actually added by the hand-off: close to zero
When you can ship a compliant, production-ready feature in 15 minutes using your own ADRs as context, the human router in the middle becomes the single biggest blocker to velocity.
The good ones evolve. The rest don't.
The great Product Owners — the ones who already think like engineers and fight for outcomes — become the new engineering leaders.
They stop writing tickets and start owning KPIs.
They stop translating requirements and start shipping revenue.
The rest?
They become the cautionary tale we tell in 2030 about the jobs AI actually eliminated.
"The engineers who succeed in this new world will be the ones who can own the full outcome — from customer problem to production impact — without needing a translator."
He's right.
And OutcomeOps is the first system that makes it safe, auditable, and compliant for engineers to do exactly that — at scale, in regulated environments, without breaking the bank or the auditor.
The Shift: From Chaos to Clarity
The same work. Two different worlds. Which one are you living in?
NEXT
The Rise of the Outcome Engineer
Meet the new engineering elite:
They're not coming. They're already here.
The companies fighting to protect the status quo are the same ones who fought DevOps in 2015.
We know how that movie ended.
The ones who embrace this shift won’t just move faster.
They’ll move into a different league entirely.
The traditional Product Owner isn’t dying because AI is cruel.
It’s dying because it was always a workaround for a broken system.
OutcomeOps just removed the need for the workaround.
Welcome to the future.
Your best people are about to become unstoppable.
The rest will spend the next five years discovering they should have started with us.
P.S. If you're a Product Owner reading this and feeling that pit in your stomach — good.
That feeling is the starting line.
Come build the next generation of engineering leadership with us.
Schedule the 30-minute briefing →Fair-use quotes from Vibe Coding by Gene Kim, Steve Yegge, and Dario Amodei, Harper Business 2025, used for commentary and criticism as permitted under copyright law.