This article’s content is taken from a conference talk that I have delivered over the past few years and was designed as a humorous, empathetic discussion of organisation dysfunction. Presence of these is not a failure, but it’s curious how they embed themselves in organisations of all sizes and types.
It does not take long within the domain of digital product delivery to sense an underlying contradiction between aspiration and action. Whether in large-scale government programmes or lean start-ups, many teams articulate ambitious goals, invest in frameworks, tools, and talent, but find themselves repeatedly encountering the same structural inefficiencies and bottlenecks. It is rooted in the fact that organisations have internalised - small, plausible untruths that persist because they offer comfort, even if they erode a team's ability to deliver.
These ten lies (if we can call them that) might be familiar to you and understanding them is recognition of what shapes organisational behaviour.
1. More people will fix it
When work slows down or delivery falls behind, it is tempting to add more people. But this rarely helps because new joiners need time. More people means more meetings, more handoffs, and more delays as well as your coordination overhead growing faster than capacity. Focused teams with clear goals move faster than larger teams chasing shifting targets. Start with fewer people doing the right things.
2. Scrum will solve everything
Scrum is useful in complex environments. It offers structure for teams to learn and adapt but it is not a solution on its own. If goals are unclear or trust is missing, Scrum cannot fix that. Simply running the events (I’d call that mechanical Scrum) or sending people to training does not guarantee improvement. Without alignment, purpose, and support, Scrum becomes just another set of processes.
3. We can transfer knowledge by writing it down
Documentation is helpful, but not enough. You cannot replace experience with a document. The most useful knowledge is often built through interaction, not recorded on Confluence. Pairing, shadowing, and co-working over-time help people to learn from each other. If one person’s departure causes fear, you lost the battle months ago - the problem is not their exit, it’s how knowledge is shared today.
4. Roadmaps are promises
It feels good to show a roadmap because it creates a sense of direction, but a fixed 12-month plan does not reflect how real work unfolds. If a team can’t plan a two-week Sprint, how can they plan a year-long roadmap? Markets change. Customers change. Priorities change. Roadmaps should be living guides, updated as new evidence emerges.
5. The Product Backlog can hold everything
A Product Backlog is a tool for focus. When it grows into hundreds of items, most of which will never be touched, it stops being useful. When your clarity (transparency) disappears, it ceases to be useful. A point to remember when adding a new requirement is that is doesn’t just have to be a good idea, it has to be good enough that it will eventually rise to the top. Anything else is noise. A lean Product Backlog helps teams make better decisions.
6. People can work across multiple teams
Time-splitting sounds efficient. In practice, it weakens both teams because people lose context. You do not get 50 percent of someone’s attention twice! You get scattered focus and reduced impact. Teams work best when people can commit fully. Assign people to one team and let them stay there long enough to contribute properly. Isn’t it a little bit funny that the people who get paid the most are often the ones who do the most context switching, but precisely the people who do the least direct-value-add work?
7. There’s nothing wrong with our process
Even stable teams need to reflect w processes grow stale. If you can measurably prove to me over the past three months that your team have improved, you’ve got a problem. Teams that stop learning stop improving. If nothing has changed in months, improvement has stopped.
8. Scaling will help us work better
When delivery struggles, leaders often respond by scaling (often using something like SAFe). A framework has never been the solution to a problem but that is what many organisations use because it’s tangible and can be explained on a transformation plan. Scaling frameworks do not fix unclear goals or weak ownership, they will just spread your dysfunction more widely.
9. Reports and documents prove progress
Reports show activity and output, but they rarely show outcome (behaviour change). Teams should be judged by what they release and what users gain, not by slide decks story points. If there is a choice between attending a product review or reading an after-action report – send me the calendar invite!
10. Products deliver value
A product on its own does not create value - people do. A well-designed tool built in a toxic environment will underperform. A healthy team with clear goals can improve even a basic product. We need to remember this when considering remuneration, strategy, marketing and morale.
Bonus Lie: AI will fix everything
Artificial intelligence offers powerful tools. However, without structural clarity, strategic focus, and disciplined delivery, these tools do not resolve foundational constraints - they amplify them. This isn’t to say that AI doesn’t help – of course it does – but fundamentally it’s there to help you learn and validate faster, yet very few people use it for this.
Conclusion
These lies persist not because they are convincing, but because they are convenient (I’d eat my own hat if you read these and thought that your organisation doesn’t exhibit any of them). The first step is acknowledging that they exist and only then can you begin to address them.