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.