Product Management Anti Patterns

Karla Schönicke, an interim product lead, describes seven behaviours that in her experience frustrate product teams and the people who hire a freelancer to fix them. At Freelance Unlocked 2024 she calls them anti-patterns, "how to best mess it up". She says she has seen all of them in practice.

**What the talk covers**

- Working only with the scrum team. Ignore the stakeholders pulling on the product, she says, and it will fail, so learn their expectations first.
- Jumping straight into work on day one. Write down the assignment, goals and metrics with everyone involved. In her experience this takes a week, not half an hour, but otherwise goals shift later and "we never agreed that" follows.
- The proxy product manager: the title, but no authority over vision, strategy and decisions, and no access to customers. She asks for accountability for outcomes, not output.
- Reporting to the CTO or to sales. Under a CTO, she says, product work turns into technical debt and architecture, under sales into a feature factory. She asks for a head of product who understands the whole.
- Mixing up project and product. Estimates in scrum help to grasp risk and are not meant for a Gantt chart. A product, she says, starts when the project ends.
- Believing developers should only code. In her view they must talk to customers and the business.
- Siloing product, engineering and design. The disciplines should work on one problem together, she says, not be booked by the hour.

**From the Q&A**

A dispute over a product name days before launch was settled, she says, by testing the name with a small user group. Her lesson: get to know each stakeholder on day one and take early disagreement seriously. Feature creep shows when tickets carry over from sprint to sprint.

**Who it's for**

Product managers and product owners, and freelancers who work with product teams.