by Stefan Wolpers|FeaturedAgile and ScrumLean and Product
TL;DR: When Incentives Sabotage Product Strategy
Learn why many Product Owners and Managers worry about the wrong thing: saying no instead of saying yes to everything. This article reveals three systematic rejection techniques that strengthen stakeholder relationships while protecting product strategy to avoid that organizational incentives sabotage product strategy.
Discover how those drive feature demands, why AI prototyping complicates strategic decisions, and how transparent Anti-Product Backlog systems transform resistance into collaboration.
Effective product development requires both strategic alignment and healthy Product Backlog management. Misalignment leads to backlog bloat, trust erosion, and building the wrong products. By implementing proper alignment tools, separating discovery from delivery, and maintaining appropriate backlog size (3-6 sprints), teams can build products that truly matter. Success depends on trust, collaboration, risk navigation, and focusing on outcomes over outputs. Learn more about how to embrace the alignment-to-value pipeline and create your product operating model.
TL; DR: The Pre-Mortem: A Non-negotiable Part of Your Product Development Toolbox
Do you want to build products that avoid costly mistakes, meet customer needs, and drastically enhance your career prospects? Then, the pre-mortem is your secret weapon!
By imagining how a project might fail before it even begins, teams can identify and mitigate hidden risks early, ensuring a more resilient, successful outcome. This article explains why pre-mortems are a brilliant tool for risk mitigation, improving your team’s decision process, and how they can transform your product development process. Learn how to apply this proactive strategy and create bulletproof products.
Despite criticism from the product community regarding Scrum as a framework for effective product creation, namely Marty Cagan himself, I believe that it is worthwhile to compare the principles that help form successful product teams with those of Scrum. Let’s delve into an analysis of “Transformed” and how its principles align with Scrum’s.
TL; DR: The Product Operating Model — An Interview with Marty Cagan
Let’s explore Marty Cagan’s insights on revolutionizing product management, embracing empowered teams, and fostering innovation by employing the Product Operation Model described in his latest book “Transformed.” We will uncover how to effectively navigate the transformational path to a product-centric approach and how Marty sees Scrum in this context. (Move directly to the Scrum-related part of the interview.)
TL; DR: Escaping the Feature Factory — Refocussing From Output to Outcome
The feature factory fate is not inevitable; there is hope to avoid becoming a mere cog in the machinery. Learn how!
In many large organizations, Scrum teams fall into the ‘feature factory’ trap, focusing more on churning out features than creating real value. It’s too bad that this shift undermines Agile principles and hampers long-term success and innovation. Let’s discuss how and why this happens and what we can do to break the chains of the feature factory.
