Food for Agile Thought #465: Reverse Product Roadmap, Productwashing, Bossless Organizations, Framework Fever

Welcome to the 465th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,913 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.

This week, John Utz promotes a “reverse roadmap” approach, focusing on feature elimination to simplify products. Mark Graban critiques command-and-control leadership for sabotaging Lean transformations by prioritizing cost-cutting, while Maarten Dalmijn warns against blindly adopting frameworks like SAFe without context. Also, Pim de Morree shares lessons from transforming Indaero into a bossless organization, and Ula Ojiaku highlights the dangers of “framework fever,” advocating for tailored, context-aware methodologies to prevent costly misalignments.

Next, Paolo Lacche introduces “product washing,” where companies falsely claim to implement product management, reducing PMs to powerless roles. Todd Lankford emphasizes delivering value over managing backlogs, offering actionable tips for Product Owners, and Warren Schirtzinger demystifies the misunderstood “crossing the chasm” concept, highlighting critical misapplications. Moreoever, Aakash Gupta and Gagan Biyani delve into Maven’s cohort-based learning model, its scalability, the value of Product Management in startups, and long-term career strategies for job seekers.

Lastly, Viktor Cessan outlines how Viafree leveraged a remote Self-Selection process to transition disbanded teams, ensuring smooth integration and maintaining motivation, and Jock Busuttil addresses the backlash against the Spotify Model, emphasizing its evolution and enduring lessons. Eric Brechner shares strategies to avoid knowledge loss when key employees leave, while Soren Kaplan offers actionable steps to manage team conflict. Finally, Jerry Neumann challenges the belief in accelerating technology adoption, exploring the factors that truly influence adoption speed and societal impact.

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🏆 Tip of the Week

Product Coalition: John Utz advocates for a “reverse roadmap” approach, focusing on deleting unused or outdated product features to simplify and enhance the product. He argues that consistent feature elimination improves efficiency, user experience, and product focus: "Delete to Accelerate: Transforming Your Product with a Reverse Roadmap."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

Medium: The author presents a bizarre solution to the “grind” of endless Scrum sprints: “scrum days” and “scrum holidays.” Instead of addressing the real problems in Scrum implementation, he advocates treating teams like toddlers needing nap time. Clearly, the principles of agility—and common sense—got lost somewhere between the two: "Alternatives to endless scrum."

➿ Agile & Leadership

• Maarten Dalmijn critiques the “copy-paste” mentality in Agile transformations, where organizations blindly implement frameworks like SAFe or the Spotify model without considering their unique context. He argues that such approaches often fail because they neglect the complexity of organizational systems: "Why Do Most Agile Transformations Fail?"

• Mark Graban highlights how command-and-control leadership often sabotages Lean transformations by focusing solely on cost-cutting and neglecting Lean’s core principles of respect for people and continuous improvement, leading to predictable failure: "Lean Failure Explained: When Command-and-Control Leadership Sabotages Success."

• Corporate Rebels: Pim de Morree shares insights from a 12-month experiment at Indaero that transformed it into a bossless organization. While achieving significant financial growth, salary increases, and employee empowerment, the journey faced challenges in autonomy, conflict resolution, and stress management: "No Managers, No Problem? Our 12-Month Experiment in Running a Bossless Organization."

• Forbes: Uloaku Ojiaku critiques the “framework fever” that leads organizations to adopt one-size-fits-all methodologies, causing more harm than good blindly. She advocates for customized, context-aware approaches to avoid costly misalignments: "The Pitfalls Of Framework Fever: Why One-Size-Fits-All Approaches Fail In Complex Organizations."

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🎯 Product

• UX Collective: Paolo Lacche coins the term “product washing” to describe companies that claim to have a product management function but fail miserably. These companies reduce PMs to powerless project managers and damage the entire industry: "Is your company productwashing? How most tech organizations became the real imposters in the product world."

• Medium: Todd Lankford argues that Product Owners should focus on delivering value rather than managing backlogs, offering five practical tips on shifting from Product Backlog administration to harvesting early value for users and businesses: "Escape the Backlog Black Hole: How I Help Product Owners Harvest Early Value."

• Warren Schirtzinger explains why the concept of “crossing the chasm” in the technology adoption lifecycle is widely misunderstood, highlighting six critical areas of confusion, from mischaracterizing innovations to applying chasm theory inappropriately across industries: "Chasm Crossing Confusion."

• 🎙 Aakash Gupta and Gagan Biyani discuss Maven’s cohort-based learning model, its scalable approach to high-engagement courses, and the importance of Product Management in startups. They also explore founder leadership, long-term job search strategies, and building value-driven careers: "How Maven Builds Product, and Whether You Should Take a Maven PM Course with Maven CEO Gagan Biyani."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Viktor Cessan shares how Viafree successfully used a remote and partial Self-Selection process to transition disbanded teams into Viaplay’s teams. With careful preparation, team alignment, and flexibility in choices, the process allowed for smooth integration despite the challenges of remote work, minimizing downtime while preserving employee motivation and engagement: "Case Study: Remote Self-Selection at Viafree."

• Jock Busuttil discusses the backlash against the Spotify Model, emphasizing that it was merely a snapshot in time for Spotify, evolving as the company grew. He explores its limitations, misconceptions, and enduring lessons on autonomy, collaboration, and alignment with strategic goals: "The Backlash against the Spotify Model."

• Eric Brechner explains how to avoid knowledge loss when key employees leave, emphasizing assigning primary and backup owners to critical areas rather than relying on departing SMEs to document or verbally transfer knowledge: "Knowledge loss."

• Soren Kaplan highlights common sources of team conflict, such as communication issues, role ambiguity, and personality clashes. They provide actionable strategies, from fostering open communication to implementing structured conflict resolution processes to transform conflict into collaboration: "Collaboration Strategies for Managing Team Conflict."

🎶 Encore

• Jerry Neumann challenges the widely held belief that the rate of technology adoption is accelerating. He argues that adoption speed is influenced by factors such as relative advantage, compatibility, and complexity, rather than technological inevitability, and cautions against conflating fast adoption with long-term societal impact: "The Illusion of Acceleration."

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