Can We Remove Dependencies?

Achieving autonomy is essential if you want to hold teams accountable for outcomes rather than just outputs. However, meaningful autonomy requires clear scope separation and independent codebases for each team. But is this truly feasible?

The most effective way to divide scope is by aligning teams around the user journey since that’s how customers perceive your product. However, real-world complexities arise because a company’s offerings often consist of multiple, interconnected products and channels. This makes it difficult to maintain consistency across all areas when introducing new products and features. The key isn’t to force consistency everywhere but to make deliberate choices about where you are comfortable with inconsistencies—whether between channels, products, or journey stages. Like a product strategy, this involves accepting that you cannot be perfect in every area and consciously deciding where to make trade-offs.

When it comes to code separation, monolithic codebases are easier to manage and often perform better. However, splitting a codebase into independent services introduces its own set of trade-offs. Again, it’s about deciding where you are willing to compromise. As organisations grow, teams encounter more merge conflicts and challenges on the path to production. You need to assess whether the speed gains from autonomy justify the additional costs and overhead.

In summary, achieving autonomy is complex, with trade-offs inherent in all approaches. This is where having a process vision becomes invaluable—it provides a framework for comparing and prioritising process improvements. If your vision is to have “zero blocking dependencies from idea to satisfied customers,” then making these trade-offs becomes more manageable.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

Gen AI Is Coming For Remote Workers First by Matt Beane
Remote workers face a higher risk of automation due to their digital tasks. However, ease of use, growing AI autonomy, and company preparedness will lead to significant job changes, requiring reskilling in management and AI.

Product Pushback: Making Teams Autonomous Is Too Hard And Expensive by Rory Madden
Enabling team autonomy through scope and separate code bases might seem good in theory but impractical in practice. Let’s explore what autonomy requires, why it’s valuable, and how organisations can approach it.

Product Direction

AI Products Worth Building For Product Managers: What To Focus On by Oleg Yakubenkov
Long-term AI success comes from focusing on niche automation and unique solutions, not competing with giants or building quick fixes.

Is Product Art Or Science? by Marty Cagan
Product Development blends art and science. While solving problems, artistry enhances meaning and value, turning products into something customers love and businesses need.

Continuous Research

How Designers Create Alignment by Ed Orozco
Alignment ensures everyone knows responsibilities and next steps, keeping projects on track. Designers and PMs can use journals to maintain team alignment.

Scale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies by Jorge Arango
LLMs make work faster and more efficient, helping to organize content at scale. They augment, not replace human input, but using them requires hands-on learning and new workflows.

Continuous Design

Generative UI And Outcome-oriented Design by Kate Moran and Sarah Gibbons
GenUI promises highly personalized interfaces — a shift from designing for many to tailoring for the individual.

How To Manage Dangerous Actions In User Interfaces by Victor Ponamariov
Prevent user errors with strategies like modal dialogs, danger zones, inline guards, two-factor confirmation, and undo options for non-destructive actions.

Continuous Delivery

Unpopular Opinion About "Moving Back To On-Prem” by Eyal Estrin
The public cloud offers unmatched scalability, cost efficiency, and rapid experimentation with GenAI, while on-prem solutions struggle with hardware limitations and data center management burdens.

Why Does Netflix Famously Have Thousands Of Microservices? by CloudWay
Microservices offer scalability and flexibility but add complexity. A monolith or modulith may be better for small teams. Consider your goals, team structure, and risks before choosing.

Looking For New Venues:
We are always on the lookout for new venues to host our Free Community Events.

We partner with venues on a contra basis to ensure our community events remain free and accessible to all. We’re always on the lookout for venues like offices, co-working hubs, and conference spaces.

For venues, it’s a unique opportunity to showcase your brand to the right audience by featuring it across our marketing channels and at our events. You’ll gain direct access to talented professionals for recruitment, and the chance to connect with industry leaders and potential clients in a relaxed environment—building relationships that can lead to future opportunities.

Emily McCormack, our dedicated Community Events Manager, would love to hear from you. Don’t miss this chance and reach out today!

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Check out more upcoming community events 

Video of the Week:
Driving Customer-Centric Transformation in Banking

Sonali shares Chase’s transformative digital journey, which empowers over 80 million users to manage their financial lives effortlessly. In this talk, she explores how Chase integrates product, technology, design, and data to deliver seamless customer experiences, all while fostering a culture rooted in experimentation and measurement. Learn how Chase’s commitment to innovation, from modernizing tech stacks to expanding its design organization, helps the 150-year-old brand stay responsive and customer-centric. This session is packed with insights into building impactful, user-driven solutions. Dive into the full session here👇👇

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: How do you manage scope dependencies between projects/deliveries?

Upfront planning took the top spot with 23.5%. It seems teams still rely on structured approaches like increment planning and business cases to manage scope dependencies. This isn’t surprising given the complexity of aligning multiple teams, but it does come with challenges when flexibility is required down the line.

Close behind, with 20.7%, is cross-team communication and alignment with the whole team involved. This result highlights the growing emphasis on fostering collaboration across teams to ensure all members are on the same page when it comes to managing dependencies.

Interestingly, 20% went to relying on project/product managers for cross-team communication. It’s clear that while managers play a crucial role, there’s a shift towards more collective responsibility when tackling dependencies.

The lowest-ranking approach was separating value streams that do not overlap, at 18.3%. While this approach is the best for autonomy it is the hardest to achieve.

No matter your method, hope you have seamless project deliveries ahead!