How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
iism.org

The problem statement is very well written. The Director of Engineering rotating because they can’t deliver, and the battle between Product and Engineering.

Conclusion is rushed, but it boils down to what agile advocates at the core: product manager and QA need to be in the room along with engineering.

It is until they hear daily about the challenges, first hand, and they see the struggle that it makes sense. Does not matter how many reports the PM does, first have seeing why technical debt is making things slow is invaluable.

Only addition I would add is: there is a reason why sprint waterfalls exist. You can’t iterate forever, and someone needs to play the role of the mature person that knows when something is good enough and needs to be shipped. I think Agile as a framework is at its limits. We need something that lets us run the engineering but at the same time becomes more predictable to business.

I‘m 2 years into my first role as a product owner (made the switch from design) and working at a fortune 100. The thing that’s struck me most since starting this role is that as while the company has invested more to our transition to agile teams (hiring external agile transformation companies, everyone goes through scrum training etc) we seem to have distanced ourselves even further from the customer.

I report to a product manager, who I think in turn has had zero hours interacting directly with our customers or our users. Our roadmap seems completely driven based on whatever features seem to be flavor of the month (or quarter since we do roadmap planning quarterly) and it’s been a struggle to even try and get buy in to having our customers represented in some way by proxy (e.g. through personas, or setting product metrics that attempt to measure customer value). Features that we do release have no expectations around what is considered successful usage (usage will be measured, but without context, so if 5% of customers use a feature there’s no interpretation if this is really low, or really high).

The puzzling thing is that when I talk to my manager (or managers manager) about this disconnect, they seem to agree in principle, and that we should be doing these things but no one ever does.

I’ve been told that someone in leadership described me as being too “black and white” in this area, but I consider myself both pragmatic and flexible to alternative ideas.

Because I’m still new to this role, I wonder if I’m being naive or idealistic around how we approach our feature development, or if this is just how most companies operate.

I don't blame people for avoiding such tasks, especially in a Fortune 100. The bigger the company, the more diffuse responsibility and the harder it is to steer the ship anyway.