How One Team Stopped Building the Wrong Things If your product backlog is full and your product outcomes are flat, the problem is probably not your team’s execution capacity. It is the…

Here's how one team stopped building the wrong things.

A backlog built from a validated decomposition chain is not just better organized — it produces fundamentally different team behavior.

medium.com/@paulcrosby/...

Can’t stop stupid. You’ll wind up playing their game. They made themselves look foolish and you don’t need to stand by a fool.

Can’t fix stupid. They don’t want insight and change. They picked a side and will stay with it no matter the outcome.

🌑🌑🌑

I keep hearing Yoda’s voice when I read this 😂

The Foundations Are Behind You. Here Is What You Are Actually Capable of Now. I have been thinking about what to call the moment after the foundational work is done.

Check point in your journey to product centric. crosbypaul.substack.com/p/the-founda...
#productcentric #productmanagement #producttransformation

Step 6: Here Is How to Actually Design Your Team Topology — Not Just Read About It The OTT design exercise uses the completed value stream as a stage-by-stage design input, asking four questions at each stage to identify which team type should own the work.

Here Is How to Actually Design Your Team Topology — Not Just Read About It crosbypaul.substack.com/p/step-6-her...
#productmanagement #teamtopologies #productcentric

Step 6: How to Use Your Value Stream to Design Teams That Actually Deliver If your teams are constantly waiting on each other, handing work across boundaries that nobody designed intentionally, and watching release timelines stretch in ways nobody can explain — this article ...

Using Value Streams to design product teams - it's step 6 in the product transformation journey.
#productmanagement #producttransformation #productstrategy
www.linkedin.com/pulse/step-6...

Crosby Paul (@crosbypaul) The reality is organizations don’t need to be 100% product centric…here’s where product centric folks get it wrong.

The reality is organizations don’t need to be 100% product centric…here’s where product centric folks get it wrong. substack.com/@crosbypaul/...

The First Thing to Do After You Finish Your Product Catalog A few weeks ago I was on a call with a product leader at a large healthcare organization who had just finished something genuinely hard.

Got the product catalog done? Here’s the next step . substack.com/@crosbypaul/...

The Map Your Product Catalog Has Been Waiting For A few months ago I was on a call with a product leader who had done everything right.

The architecture dependency map is something every prodict manager needs. This is why. substack.com/@crosbypaul/...

The Foundations Are Complete. Now Comes the Part Nobody Plans For. I want to be direct about something that most transformation frameworks leave out.

Lets talk product centric transformation substack.com/@crosbypaul/...

You Did Not Set Out to Build an Operating Model. But That Is What You Built. I want to talk about a specific kind of moment.

It started as a product catalog and gree into something so much more powerful. substack.com/@crosbypaul/...

The Hardest Part of Value Stream Mapping Is Not the Map Last issue I walked through how to build your first product value stream — the five steps, the two-hour session, the findings you should expect.

Prodcut Value Streams are worth the effort substack.com/@crosbypaul/...

You Built the Value Streams. Here Is How to Keep Them From Becoming Shelf Documents. I want to tell you about the second time I built a set of product value streams.

Howa your product value stream today? open.substack.com/pub/crosbypa...

When Product-Tech Alignment Breaks Down, Here Is How to Rebuild It I want to talk about what happens when the alignment work fails.

How to get your tech and products aligned substack.com/@crosbypaul/...

The Map Your Product Catalog Has Been Waiting For A few months ago I was on a call with a product leader who had done everything right.

You ve got the product catalog and the architecture dependency map but there is one more thing you need substack.com/@crosbypaul/...

I just can’t even believe this is real…but it’s real.

Raw America (@rawstory) THIS IS GREAT: Sir Ian McKellen destroys Trump on Colbert last night by performing a Shakespeare monologue from Sir Thomas More. Fits the historical moment exactly. Make sure this gets around!

substack.com/@rawstory/no...

The Hidden Bottleneck Nobody Talks About: Why Your Product Catalog Is Your Roadmap to… You probably have no idea how many products your organization actually has.

In 5 years, the competitive difference won't be who has the smartest PMs. Both sides will.
The difference will be who can see their entire product ecosystem and move cohesively within it.
What's the visibility gap in your organization? bit.ly/4qq3egi

We talk about empowering PMs: give them autonomy, trust, decision-making authority.
But we often do this while keeping them blind to their own organization's product landscape.
That's not empowerment. That's empowerment with one hand while constraining with the other.
Thread (5/6)

Novice chess players focus on their piece and immediate threats. Expert chess players see the entire board.
Most PMs are playing chess while only seeing three squares in front of them.
Visibility isn't about control. It's about playing the whole game.
Thread (4/6)

PMs who rebuild something that already exists is operating without full information.
Every missed partnership opportunity = invisible constraint.
Every strategic decision made in isolation = organizational invisibility at work.
Product visibility isn't bureaucracy. It's empowerment.
Thread (3/6)

A mid-level PM was building a customer onboarding feature. One hallway conversation revealed: her organization had already built that same capability 4 different ways across 4 different product lines.
She had no idea. She was optimizing locally while blind to the bigger picture.
Thread (2/6)

The Hidden Bottleneck Nobody Talks About: Why Your Product Catalog Is Your Roadmap to… You probably have no idea how many products your organization actually has.

Here's a question I rarely hear asked in product management: What information do your product managers actually use to make decisions every day? Not what they theoretically have access to. What they actually use.
The answer reveals everything.
Thread (1/6) bit.ly/4qq3egi #productmanagement

The Hidden Bottleneck Nobody Talks About: Why Your Product Catalog Is Your Roadmap to… You probably have no idea how many products your organization actually has.

Finished my latest article this morning. "The Hidden Bottleneck Nobody Talks About: Why Your Product Catalog Is Your Roadmap to Transformation". Glad the morning coffee kicked in. Check it out on Medium: medium.com/@paulcrosby/...

When business and technology speak the same language about products:
✓ Portfolio clarity improves ✓ Prioritization gets faster ✓ Resource allocation becomes transparent ✓ Cross-functional collaboration actually works ✓ Cycle times compress
Product alignment is a competitive advantage.

We didn't impose a definition. We co-created one.
Define: 1️⃣ The Product = customer outcome 2️⃣ The Platform = technical systems enabling it 3️⃣ Dependencies = organizational functions required
Simple. Collaborative. Shared.
Portfolio planning went from 2-3 weeks to 1 week. 5/6

The moment that captures it perfectly:
Business: "We need to modernize the Prior Authorization Product."
Technology: "Which of the four backend systems are you talking about?"
Silence.
Business thought: one product. Technology knew: four tightly coupled systems. 4/6

Technology teams saw products as architecture:
"Our products are: XYZ API, rules engine, data warehouse, audit logging infrastructure."
They understood constraints, dependencies, data flows.
But ask them why it matters to customers? No answer. That’s the second half of the problem. 3/6