For over a decade, I have been helping organisations, mainly very large ones, transform to adopt a product way of working. Typically this means:
- Customer centric rather than organisation centric.
- Outcome focused rather than output.
- Leadership rather than Failureship.
- Frequent delivery of small things instead of infrequent delivery of big things.
Many of the changes associated with Product Transformations are the same as those associated with Agile Transformations.
As such, based on the many mistakes I’ve made over the last decade, and the signals I’ve read in the entrails of LinkedIn, here are the anti-patterns we should expect to see as the Product Community of Solutions misleads its customers over the chasm.
- Context free
- Organisation Structure
- Roles versus Accountability
- Big bang!
- Process over risk
- Product Owner Coaches
- Thought Leaders
- Certification
- Wannabes
- Cost reduction
Context Free
2025 will see the mass marketing and adoption of context free solutions by product coaches and consultancies. Standardised product processes will be imposed on teams, and practitioners who suggest context specific approaches will be pushed out of the door.
New roles will pop up across the organisation and on LinkedIn, though most will be satisfied internally. PMO will be transformed into Business Value coaches and OKR magicians. Business Analysts will discover that all along they have been customer persona whisperers, Needs harvesters and big jobbies to be done facilitators. Project Managers will transform into Project Managers, who continue to undermine any effort to effect change because they can!
In giddy excitement, large organisations with product organisations consisting of tens and hundreds and thousands of products will spend a fortune on consulting and training from people who have never worked on a successful product, or worked in a company with more than a few people, or developers with no experience with product because they are known as excellent “executive whisperers”
Product practitioners will watch in horror as context free PowerPoints are built in front of their eyes. One size fits all processes will be forced on them. Practitioners will learn to fear the word “mapping” as it indicates a developer has rebranded a practice as their own, though they barely understand it. They will need to drop existing practices or hide them, providing positive experience reports at the “mapping anonymous” meeting organised by the “mapping community of practice”.
Continued unfulfilled demand will entice unsuspecting graduates to spend their future income on training in an attempt to jump on the product bandwagon causing a massive debt burden to the graduates. The side benefit will be graduates see university fees as the bargain they were compared to the cost of a series of two day training sessions running around the street talking to strangers about “Product”, “Needs” and “Jobbies”.
Organisation Structure
Having learnt from the Agile fiasco, everyone now knows that the real money (high day rate) is advising senior executives on how to engage in an unnecessary reorganisation.
Rather than focus on responsibilities and the skills needed to fulfil them, consultancies, coaches and thought leaders will focus on new departments and new names of all things organisational.
Expect to see teams renamed as squads, then crews and finally complex adaptive flights. Products will be called value streams, value constraints and enabling streams. Every team will be forced to contain an expert in complexity thinking who will use NLP to address the conflicts generated by the complexity of team interactions.
Executives will be abused if they fail to adopt complexity based organisation scaffolds that have been proven to work at scale… At scale meaning four close friends successsful got the idea to work for three days at a conference in Abeline, Texas.
Roles versus Accountability
New roles and job families will spring up across the organisation. Product Owners, Product Managers, Product Directors and Product Executives will be lead by Chief Product Officers who also lead infestations of Customer Whispers, Customer Analysts, Customer Managers, Customer Developers. Customer Testers, and Customer DevOps engineers.
Once people have transferred into one of the new strategic roles, they will continue to work in exactly the same way as they did before, they will not learn anything new or try any new techniques as they are perfect in the new role “just as they are”. This will be validated by their huge pay rise and large guaranteed bonus.
No new role will have any associated accountability. People will be rewarded regardless of whether things get done.
Big Bang!
The new product organisation will be implemented as a big bang. One day the organisation will be successful with millions of customers, the next day it will be a product organisation!
The product organisation will be built from scratch in a WeWorks office. Those in the know will be subject to an NDA (never do anything) agreement that forbids communication with the rest of the organisation.
No consultant, coach or thought leader will consider the implication of culture or the power struggle over who makes decisions between the existing organisation and the new unicorn organisation. Popular names for the NDA project will be “Illuminatus”, “Titanic” and “Thirteen”.
In order to ensure success of the new way of working, executives will insist that trusted individuals lead the new organisation. The trusted individuals are the ones they have used to lead every other transformation effort that failed. These leaders will be supported by the consultants, coaches and thought leaders who failed with the agile transformations. They learned from the agile transformation failures and doubled their day rates, using search and replace to remove “agile” and replace it with “product”, and replace “train” with “customer”. “Mapping” will be replaced by “Mapping”…. Because it sells well with developers who hate the word analysis.
Process over Risk
Members of the product operations teams will be told to simply “Follow the process to guarantee success”.
Every product tesseract will be governed by the Product Trio, consisting of a Product lead, a Technical Lead and a Design Lead. The trio will ensure that all journeys follow the process.
The trio will ignore risk and common sense. The organisation’s articles of association will be rewritten to guarantee all trios have a design lead regardless of whether the biggest risk is the customer or some other risk like testing. In a landmark experience report a designer at CloudStrike will show that a beautifully designed API is more effective than one that has been tested.
Product Owner Coaches
Riots will break out spontaneously across the world when people realise that every single person on the planet, all eight billion of them, has been trained and then coached in the product owner role.
Product owner coaches will finally admit that they have no experience of product and go back to working as PE teachers in public schools where they honed their rucking skills.
Thought Leaders
Once the budgets for creating Product Organisations are known, thought leaders from every possible background will realise that they are experts in product and have transferable knowledge. They will leverage their “fame” and “pulling power” to convince content starved conferences to let them deliver keynotes with the following set of titles:
- The product organisation
- Product Operations and me me me
- Product Operations Organisation
- Product Organisation Operations
- Complexity informed Product
- The people’s front of Product
- Sensemaking IS Product
- Test driven Product
- Refactoring Product
- Product Product Mapping Mapping
- Product Product Product Done Done Done
- THE product retrospective
- THE retrospective for product
- Product of Product
- Product 3.0
- Product Typologies
- Product People’s Front
- Lean Product
- Value Stream Product
- I need a job but I’m irrelevant
- Product Play
- Product Games
The thought leaders will present ideas that are just plain wrong, or present ideas they have stolen from practitioners as if they were based on their own experiences. Of course the presentation will be great, just the content will be rotten.
Expect to see new shiny product frameworks or a product bolt on to a dodgy unreliable framework from your favourite thought leader this year.
Certification
In 2025, a large consultancy will announce “Product Executive” certification. Their extensive customer base will be told to only engage in a product transformation if it is lead by someone holding the PE cert. The PE cert will be experience based, and only be available to the following:
- Customers who have committed $50 million consultancy fee to the large consultancy, for a product transformation. These customers will need to sign an ignorance waiver indicating that they will ignore all advice or knowledge not provided by the large consultancy.
- Partners of the Large consultancies.
The large consultancy will enter into a joint venture with the private equity firm that owns popular “little people” certification firms to create a “Product Executive Wannabe” certification. By the end of 2025 every scrum master, coach and consultant will be a certified “Product Executive Wannabe”. The full wannabe training experience will cost $42,000.
Copy cat certification schemes will appear with names like “Product President”, “Design Executive” and “Product Design Obeya”.
Certification firm’s market capitalisation will surpass those of Alphabet, Invidia and SpaceX combined… but only for forty two hours.
Wannabes
One of the most toxic personas in the transformation space are the wannabes. They are desperate to get the role so that they demonstrate to their Product Guru that they have practiced all the techniques they learned about on their Product Priestling course. They can prove to their Product Guru that they have achieved Thetan level four and are now ready to co-train with a Product Guru.
Wannabes want the job title but have no interest in the organisation or its goals. Wannabes will tear apart everything and risk everything to please their external Product Guru.
Although they look good on their resume, and interview well, if they have ever been part of any of the Agile Cults, then give them a wide birth, especially if they say they are “Pragmatic”. The word “Pragmatic” means something different to them, and you ain’t gonna like their meaning.
Cost Reduction
It does not matter what it says on the transformation tin, inside it contains “reduce cost”. That means sacking people who earn more than average and employ people who earn a lot less than average. At the same time, hire your incompetent friends to lead it but they are part of the Capex budget and have been for the past decade.
When a company with millions of customers hires a product expert who consulted with a start up that had seven customers and lost two, you know they are not really interested in the customer.
The customer focus is really a mechanism to undermine the people who currently run the company and keep their millions of customers happy.
The new CEO will hire VERY expensive consultants who will discover that operational costs are much higher than previously known, mainly due to the expensive consultants.
The share price will drop.
The CEO will be offered share options to rescue the organisation. The CEO will announce a customer focused product transformation.
The transformation will be used to hammer down operational costs by sacking difficult (high cost) individuals.
The share price will soar and the CEOs options will explode in value.
CEO cashes in options and retires.
Organisation experiences serious operational failures.
Organisation hires very expensive consultancy.
Very expensive consultancy recommends another of its partners as replacement CEO
New CEO recommends selling all the organisations valuable assets to another organisations that is undergoing a DevOps Product transformation lead by the Large consultancy.
Summary
In 2025, expect the Product Community to experience the same highs (rich thought leaders) and same lows (depressed partitioners) as the Agile, Lean, DevOps, and Gold prospecting communities before them.
Instead of rushing to get the latest certificate, try to get some experience in real work. You know, it’s actually kind of fun once the transformation circus leaves town.
So Happy New Year! And can someone pass me the pop-corn, it’s gonna be a fun one to watch.