Chapter 6 - The Root Causes of Failed Product Efforts

The Problems With Waterfall

Source of ideas comes from stakeholders or sales.

Business cases - we can’t know how much money our product will make or how much it will cost at this stage

Product roadmaps - many are a prioritized list of what stakeholders want. There are two problems. First, half of our ideas aren’t going to work. Second, is that it takes several iterations to get the product where we want it. This is called time to money.

The role of product management is more of a project manager role. It ends up boiling down to gathering requirements and documenting them for engineers. A far cry from what it should be.

Design enters the picture too late in the game and it ends up being like slapping lipstick on a pig.

Engineering gets brought into the picture far too late. Engineers are the best single source of innovation.

Agile enters the picture far too late and is not realizing it’s full potential.

This entire process is project centered. Projects are about output while product is about outcome.

In the waterfall method, all of the risk is at the end which means that customer validation happens way too late.

The biggest lost is the opportunity cost of what the organization could have and should have been doing instead. You can’t make that time or money back.

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