I’m a Product Owner. So we were in a backlog refinement session and we were writing out a very technical user story so I had the Senior Engineer on my team help me. He does that for the very technical user stories which I think is normal in a refinement session. My scrum master sent a message that was intended for my boss that said “Bob is writing the user story for him again”. I was screen sharing so everyone on my team saw it. I went after we done, I went to screenshot it and she unsent it. I spoke to my manager about it afterwards it and he said “well at some point you should be able to write user stories without having the team needing to pitch in”. I told him that defeats the purpose of a refinement session because why else would the team be there. Seems like this company doesn’t know how scrum and agile works. It also made me think how long has the SM been sending messages like this behind my back. I just want to make sure that I’m understanding agile and scrum correctly. Even for our user stories, the devs complained that the current BAU logic should be in the user story so they can know what is changing in the business flow. Our user stories had so many words. (Makes me think the devs don’t know what the code does or their lazy and don’t want to look at documentation themselves. Like how do you look at a user story and say “well I don’t know what the current business logic is). My experience in this role came off as if people on my team were trying to undermine me by constantly complaining about user stories. My stories had everything from the what, why, necessary links, example payloads, DB: table details for changes, etc.

Other POs in my org didn’t have this issue and their user stories didn’t have nearly as much words as mine with all the BAU logic. I literally asked more senior POs to view my user stories to see if they need improvement and they agreed with me that were fine. But I’ve left this job and got a role as a technical product manager so there’s that.