…process is a lot like religion. People get fanatic about their favorite processes, and it’s very difficult to reason with a fanatic. (As a side observation, my theory is that since these process people aren’t makers or managers, they tend to have more free time than the rest of us, and many tend to spend a good portion of that time on social media preaching their particular religion).
And finally, if you believe as I do that there is no one right way of doing product, then the very notion of standardizing a process across a large organization just means that you’ll be institutionalizing a process that will be a poor fit for most teams.
I certainly understand the attraction of scaling with process, and the hunger for a framework or some form of “recipe for success” at scale. But that’s just not the reality in good companies. The truth is that product leadership is hard
It’s nice when a distinguished product thinker like Marty Cagan expresses similar feelings to those I wrote in 2018:
As a practice, product management…is highly contextual…It’s hard to accomplish in a small company. As long as agile remains a series of processes and not a set of principles, it will be a religion without a higher power.
Finally, and speaking of process…these are process people. They love process. It actually gets their blood pumping. And good for them.
I continue to apply the rubric of “as little process as necessary” most of the time.