“Do you want to win arguments or solve problems?” - Rory Sutherland

You’ve gotta love this quote from Rory Sutherland.

With so much noise in the product industry today, it couldn’t be more relevant.

You don’t need to go far to see comments like "that's not real product management", "that's not agile" or [insert practice X].

While I do believe there’s a place for inspiration and increasing our exposure to what’s possible.

It’s not going to solve any problems.

When I've helped organisations become more outcome/product orientated, more often than not, I've moved them away from 'epics' and 'user stories' and towards things like one-pagers, opportunities, hypotheses, etc. Why? Because they’re are better tools for facilitating outcome thinking and experimentation.

In 2019 an HBR article stated that of the $1.3 trillion spent on transformations, $900 billion was wasted. More interesting is that, Digital and Agile transformations alike are seldom seen in product-tech companies (e.g. Canva, Google, Amazon, etc). Moreover, one job search for ‘Scrum Master’ or ‘Agile Coach’ role, and you won’t find them at these companies either — why?

Let’s start with what being Product-Led is not… It’s not: Product Management-led, Product Managers are the boss, Where product makes all the calls, Something that only engineering and product do…

IBM a few years back stated that 84% of Digital Transformations fail — although there is a lot of “grey” area around what constitutes as “failure” still 84% is a staggering number! What interests me the most is why this is the case? As a fellow coach Tanner Wortham brilliantly provoked “If this agile thing is so great, then why doesn’t it always stick?”