The Agile Product Manifesto Is Born

Defeating the Feature Factory

I’m tired of anti-patterns. It makes me mad when teams waste their energy on pointless things and fail to create REAL value sooner.

Photo by Remy_Loz on Unsplash

Many product teams are trapped and struggle to deliver value for end-users and businesses. Day in, day out, they miss opportunities to make the world better because they are too busy doing something else. Here are some ugly examples:

• Building solutions without knowing the problems behind it
• Working on multiple initiatives simultaneously because everything is important and urgent
• Creating features that business stakeholders love and end-users couldn’t care less about
• Implementing processes to increase predictability instead of figuring out how to reduce learning time
• Maintaining a gigantic Product Backlog instead of continuously inspecting and adapting
• Celebrating increased output as a success while the outcome is ignored
• Focus on mitigating risks instead of maximizing opportunities

Unfortunately, such situations happen more often than you imagine, and worse than that, teams generally feel powerless to change it. Still, top management may not perceive this scenario as a problem…