Remove These 3 Common Mistakes to Reawaken Your Product Team

Don’t let the quest for more end up being less.

“When we started removing, everything became easier.”

This was the “aha” moment for my client. They realized in today’s over-stimulated, over-worked environment, we need less, not more. Instead of adding, we should be subtracting. They saw that chasing more, better, faster, and cheaper was a hamster wheel with no reward.

I’ve found by removing the weight of excess we gain many compelling benefits:

• We become quick and reliable.
• Our work has less burdensome overhead.
• We make fewer mistakes because we have less to juggle.
• We finish more often, get feedback, and can deliver value sooner.
  

Yet, we don’t typically open the door labeled “less”.

Why do we aim to add more rather than reduce?

The easy answer: we don’t like admitting defeat.

In my experiences with over 70 organizations, I have noticed a key pattern of behavior. At this point, it’s as predictable as a springtime tornado in Texas. And just as destructive.

Companies collect excess habits over time.

They add layers upon layers of processes, rules, and procedures. Each one solves a specific problem that happened somewhere in their history. Everything they do has solid reasoning.

But these standards add a lot of weight over time, becoming outdated and unnecessary.

We get attached to our precious processes and can’t see their faults.

If your company is like most I’ve seen, you spend countless hours crafting and honing the way you operate. You aim to make it hum and purr like a well-oiled engine. Entire departments exist to standardize and manage your people to the process. It’s all in the name of risk reduction.

But all the extra weight of more adds up fast, creating more risks and headaches.

• Slow, hierarchical decision-making.
• Extra effort to cover for rare scenarios.
• Delays waiting on specialists to free up.
• Useless measures of efficient delivery of output.
  

You start to feel something is off, but you think you just need to tweak your perfect process a bit more.

Abandoning your darling never enters your mind.

You keep throwing good money and effort after bad, grasping for a way out, and end up sinking.

Trying to make our failing processes work by “doing them better” just leads to more process. It’s like quicksand—the harder you try to move, the more stuck you get.

I fall prey to this trap as much as anyone.

And I want to tell you how to avoid it. I’ve helped many escape the never-ending cycle of chasing process with more process.

It’s easy to get blinded by our habits. They make sense when we start them, but problems arise when we keep them without needing to. And this traps many organizations in a dead end.

Chasing after more does not help your agility.

And it’s difficult to turn it off.

Remove These 3 Common Mistakes to Remove the Sludge and Get Back to Flowing Value

So, subtraction is what we need. But how?

“When we started removing, everything became easier.”

Remember that quote from the start? One of my clients had that “aha” moment—they needed less process, not more. But they didn’t start there.

The company brought me in to assess its business agility.

We locked ourselves in a room to outline their operational value stream. Our goal was to determine all the steps needed to deliver end-to-end solutions for customer needs. Two weeks later, after many greasy pizza lunches, we finished their beloved process.

It was eye-opening for everyone.

• Customer-who? Nobody knew the customer.
• 1100 wish-list features filled the backlog, some 3 years old.
• 34 hand-offs to different departments to “optimize” resources.
  

The impact: concept-to-cash duration took 56 to 120 weeks.

Yet, this company used all the buzzwords and went through all the motions.

• OKRs
• Scrum teams
• Product operations
• Product value streams
• Outcome-oriented to customer needs
  

But this was nothing but theater.

Behind the curtain lay the truth. Backstage, the situation was a disaster.

And they had to do something or the show could not go on.

They removed three behavior mistakes to return to form—to get back to the essential.

Mistake 1: Losing the Customer In the Trappings of Scale

We lose sight of our customers in the quest for scale.

1. More features lead to more team members.
2. More team members lead to more teams.
3. More teams lead to more coordination.
4. More coordination leads to slow, stop-and-start work.
   

When work slows down, teams feel the heat and just keep their heads down, working harder. In turn, the team gets customer proxies. The proxies go between the team and its customer to “protect” the team from interruption. Teams keep cranking out output without a second thought about the customer.

Scaling up means more people, processes, and complexity. But you end up having less of the customer and losing touch.

Think of a small café that opens in a bustling neighborhood.

At first, the café owner knows customers by name. He remembers their favorite order and even talks to them about their day. This is the personal touch that helps this small café thrive and keeps customers coming back.

But soon, popularity grows. The owner adds more tables, hires more staff, and opens other locations. The personal touch disappears. Customer needs become just an order to fulfill by the staff.

This is precisely what happens in product teams as they scale.

And my client felt the pain of losing sight of its customer.

They had a separate customer strategy team. This team met with the customer upfront to gather requirements before starting the work. The product delivery team was not present (they were busy building). The customer stayed out of the picture for a year while the team churned out hundreds of features.

Do you think these features ended up meeting the need? Not a chance.

Just like the café, you can’t scale at the expense of losing your customer.

The best café knows its customers by name as do the best product teams.

How to Be Small and Nimble (Even at Scale)

Small has an advantage over scale.

When you have a small team, you can actually create a relationship with your customers. And getting to know your customer helps you deliver the right thing at the right time. You have the added benefit of emergent feedback, insight, and iteration.

Finding a valuable solution requires trial and error and a direct customer connection. And, while counterintuitive, you end up needing fewer features than you first imagine.

My client was already operating at scale, so they had to rethink things.

They followed 4 steps to get back to small and nimble teams:

1. Created small product teams focused on one customer need at a time.
2. Merged customer strategy into the product teams.
3. Gave feature decision-making authority to the product team.
4. Engaged product teams, connected to their customer.
5. Performed customer engagement before, during, and after development to enable rapid iteration.
   

They abandoned the factory line, embraced their customer, and never looked back.

Mistake 2: Falling in Love With Gigantic, Just-in-Case Backlogs

Back to the café.

Before opening, the chef stockpiles a massive pantry full of every imaginable ingredient. for countless variations of dishes. He buys everything in bulk, exotic rare spices and food from around the world.

The chef is proud of his variety and preparedness.

But when the café finally opens, the customers have simpler tastes. They want simple food and simple drinks. Meanwhile, the food ordered goes bad and the spices expire. The staff can’t find the simple ingredients they need among the piles of pre-ordered items.

This is what happens when we pile idea after idea into a backlog, just in case we will need it in the future.

My client had this issue.

The backlog had 1100 wish-list features. Every time a stakeholder had an idea to solve a customer need, the team added it to the backlog. They didn’t want to forget about the idea. Plus, the stakeholders held the money, so they had to store their ideas for safekeeping.

The team just couldn’t keep up with the flow of ideas, so the backlog kept growing and growing.

And a giant backlog of ideas is wasteful:

• Many of the ideas don’t meet any known need.
• The amount of undone work weighs on the mind.
• You can’t find the ideas that match the need you have right now.
  

They spent more time managing their huge wishlist than talking to their customers.

How to Embrace Just-in-Time Backlogs Instead

Keep your backlog tidy, short, and focused on what matters right now.

The most approachable backlogs only have details for what is in flight. And future work has few details. Only high-level needs exist for what’s potentially next and later. This is a now, next, and later approach to keeping backlogs small.

Keeping future details light optimizes for flexibility.

Changing your mind is no big deal when you have invested very little effort in what you replace.

But my client had already built an enormous backlog. They had spent considerable effort and time detailing all 1100 items. And the pressure was real not to let that effort go to waste.

They decided to make a drastic move (to cut the cord).

They deleted everything in their giant backlog except for three things. The backlog now only had the most important item in focus and the two needs immediately next and later. To be fair, they archived the rest just in case for reference. But this one move immediately lifted a burden off the team.

And guess what?

In the end, they only used a handful of the items in their giant backlog. The customer deemed most of them unnecessary.

This was a win-win-win situation—for the customer, the team, and the client.

Mistake 3. Getting Stuck On the Steep Slope of Hyper-Specialization

A common pitfall product teams make is to have too many specialists.

Specialized knowledge can be an asset. But you have to pair it with generalized knowledge and cooperation.

The problem surfaces when specialists only want to work on their one type of task. This comes at the expense of not helping their teammates. Work flows into a team in different shapes and sizes, and tasks aren’t evenly spread for different skills.

Work never fails to pile up in front of the one team member who is the only person skilled to do it.

Let’s go back to our café.

Assume the owner trained each employee to perform just one type of task in the kitchen. One pours the coffee, one makes espresso drinks, one serves up pastries, and one takes orders.

If every customer ordered one coffee, one espresso, and one pastry, all would be equally busy. But what happens when a manager comes in to order for his entire department? Chaos: 18 coffees, 1 custom espresso drink, and 30 pastries.

Some employees get slammed, while others sit and watch their teammates flounder.

This is what happens on product teams that have rigid boundaries.

And my client had a serious case of boundary overload. They had 34 handoffs required to get anything done. The impact: 56 to 120 weeks to get anything out the door.

Everyone had a precise job to do. But nobody was idle. Everyone kept busy with their special type of task, even if it meant starting more work in flight. Figuratively, there were piles of unintegrated tasks in every corner.

The team finished nothing they could deliver to their customers.

How to Shift to Flexibility and Cross-Functionality

We need specialists who also generalize.

The boundaries of capability should constantly expand in team members. Instead of turfs, we should have an open field where all are welcome to learn and play. This builds flexibility for many to contribute to the same type of task.

The cross-pollination of knowledge helps work flow better with fewer hand-offs and bottlenecks.

In the case of my client, they had a unique problem to solve.

With 34 specialists, they had to transfer much knowledge. So, they took another drastic move.

They only allowed one customer need in flight at a time. This forced all team members to work together on the same thing at the same time. They now had to finish one customer need before moving to the next. So, the piles of unintegrated tasks dwindled and they threw no more onto the pile.

Furthermore, they used a no-task completion policy for specialists.

1. Any task had to have a specialist and at least one inexperienced team member.
2. The specialist could not touch the keyboard or perform the task in any way.
3. Instructions traveled from the specialist to the inexperienced through instruction and guidance.
4. The inexperienced team members would execute the task.
   

By making specialists teachers, everyone learned new skills fast.

No more staying in lanes.

No more bottlenecks.

No more idle work.

Flow became steady and smooth. Ideas now ship to customers in two to four weeks.

And you now hear, “Let me help with that,” instead of, “That’s not my job.”

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Reducing Is a Gain, Not a Loss

Remember, the key to delivering value customers actually need isn’t by adding process. It’s in removing what’s in the way.

1. Remove scale to reveal your customer.
2. Remove bloated, just-in-case backlogs to clear the clutter.
3. Remove the burden of localized knowledge to get value flowing.
   

Reduce to produce the right value, in the right way, at the right time.

If you add anything, add the act of subtraction.

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