Moving away from the Monolith — faster, better with a product mindset

Understanding the core value of what you are working on is the secret to delivering impactful products.

Traditional waterfall: Dropping the details between siloed teams

This article has been updated since its original posting, and I’ve also published a second part to the article titled, Building a product oriented team.

Not that long ago I asked a team member what he was working on. “I was assigned some authentication tasks,” he replied. I was tempted to dive into how that kind of agile worked (or didn’t), but stayed on topic and rephrased my question. “Ok, got it. Why is this feature important right now?”

Basically, his answer was, “Beats me. Ask the product owner.”

To understand the context, you need a little background. I was doing a waste walk exercise with the team — trying to find out how much of the team’s effort was going into the wrong things. We wanted to discover wasted effort and uncover opportunities to improve team performance.

From his answer, you can probably guess things were a bit waterfall on this project. People worked in their niche, as specialists, with upstream and dow…