Product Process Dysfunction Diagnostic

When to Use

Use this skill when you are:

• Seeing the "shipping but not landing" pattern — features are delivered on schedule, but customers rarely adopt them or they don't move business metrics
• Investigating a waterfall-disguised-as-agile process — the team uses Scrum or Kanban but the upstream process (idea sourcing, roadmaps, business cases) is still waterfall
• New to a product leadership role — need to quickly locate which root causes are active before proposing changes
• Evaluating a team's process — whether as a coach, consultant, or peer reviewer assessing where dysfunction originates
• Preparing a process transformation argument — need to demonstrate to leadership exactly what is broken and why, with specific evidence

Preconditions: you have at least one of:

• A description of how ideas originate and reach the roadmap
• A description of the PM role and how they spend their time
• A description of when design and engineering enter the process
• Information on how and when customers are consulted
• Access to a roadmap, sprint board, or planning artifacts

Agent: Before scoring, clarify the company stage — approximately how many engineers are there, and has the company found product/market fit? Stage determines which failure patterns are most likely and which remediations are appropriate.