The Product Culture Shift

#103 – August 22, 2022

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Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work. Both of these shifts require going from a siloed, process, tech-focused mindset to a portfolio, usability, and customer-focused mindset. This is a hard transformation, and it’s easy for people who have spent their whole career building infrastructure to misunderstand what product and platform really mean. So I thought I’d share the secret to making this work.

Over the past few months, venture capital funds have been predicting a recession that hits tech scale ups hard. Valuations will be worse, raise amounts lower and some scale ups won’t be able to raise at all.

The Deming quote at the top of this post is often twisted into something worthy of Frederick Taylor: "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Deming would disagree. You can—in fact, must—manage things you can't measure, because in software, there are virtually no measurements that have any value. Wasting time collecting measurements that don't lead to improvement is not only costly, it's actively destructive.

Did you know that burnout as well as its potential solutions for leaders were discussed many millennia ago?

So if we ask people directly if their IC program is effective and they say no, what does that look like and how does it manifest? Here’s a collection of signals I’ve put together from feedback and first-hand observation to let you know that your company probably has some organizational development to work on.

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