We all need a sanity check once in a while. It’s much easier to fix problems when you first start noticing that something isn’t working as well as it should than when everything is already falling apart.
Take a look at these questions periodically. They can help you spot patterns that may be slowing down delivery, creating unnecessary work, or making life harder for your team.
- Are projects or releases regularly running behind schedule?
- Do requirements frequently need significant clarification after development has already started?
- Are priorities changing so frequently that work already underway is repeatedly disrupted?
- Does scope regularly expand or change without a clear process for evaluating the impact on timeline, cost, dependencies, and other priorities?
- Are unfinished stories or deliverables routinely carried into the next sprint or delivery cycle?
- Are you seeing recurring high-priority or high-severity defects?
- Does your backlog make it difficult to understand priorities, dependencies, status, or what the team should work on next?
- Are testing and quality considerations introduced too late rather than being part of product and delivery conversations from the beginning?
- Are some team members consistently absent from conversations where their expertise could influence important product or technical decisions?
- Do dependencies on other teams, systems, or partners regularly create unexpected delays or blockers?
- Does the business sometimes look at delivered functionality and say, “That’s not exactly what we asked for”?
- Are product, business, UX, and technology making decisions without a shared understanding of the problem, priorities, or desired outcome?
- Do important decisions, requirements, or product knowledge live primarily in meetings, chats, or individual people’s heads?
- Do the same delivery problems keep coming back even after the team believes they have been addressed?
- Do projects or initiatives regularly require more time, people, or money than originally expected?
If several of these sound familiar…
It doesn’t necessarily mean your product development process is broken. But recurring symptoms usually deserve a closer look.
A missed deadline may be a scheduling problem. Or it may be the result of unclear requirements, changing priorities, hidden dependencies, insufficient discovery, poorly structured workflows, knowledge gaps, or decisions being made too late.
The visible problem isn’t always the actual problem.
That’s where I can help.
I look across the product, processes, people, systems, documentation, tools, and information surrounding the work to understand what is actually happening, identify the gaps and underlying causes, and determine what needs to change.
