Nobody retired the Business Analyst role

Nobody retired the Business Analyst role. They just stopped hiring for it and spread the work across three other titles. The requirements still need gathering. The stakeholders still need translating. The gap between what the business asks for and what engineering builds still exists.

Somebody is still doing that work. They just don't have the title, or the mandate.

What happens when the role gets absorbed without intention

Product Owners become requirements machines with no time to actually own the product. Scrum Masters start facilitating discovery sessions they were never trained for. Engineers end up in stakeholder meetings reverse-engineering what the business actually meant.

It got distributed to people who were already stretched.

Every organization I've worked with that dropped the BA title eventually rebuilt the function under a different name. Business Design. Product Analyst. “That person who actually understands what we're building and why.”

The label changed. The cost didn't.

The cost of pretending otherwise shows up in every misaligned backlog, every feature that technically met the acceptance criteria but missed the point entirely, every sprint review where the stakeholder says “that's not what I meant,” and every discovery session that turns into a requirements gathering session because no one knows the difference.

It's fine to rename the role. It's important to ensure someone still owns the space between the business problem and the technical solution. That gap doesn't close itself, and AI tools make misunderstood requirements compound faster, not slower.

The organizations that succeed won't be the ones that remove the space between business and engineering. They'll be the ones that structure, govern, and operationalize it better.

Originally published on LinkedIn ↗. Adapted for this site.