Show me your Review sessions and I'll easily tell you whether you're a process theater, feature factory, or product lab.
It’s one of the most reliable diagnostics I have. The way your teams and stakeholders inspect what has just been built reveals your organization's true priority: celebrating activity or driving impact.
How do you switch from a feature factory to a product lab? From an organization managing projects and plans to one focused on traction towards outcomes and business impact?
Many leaders I work with feel stuck in the "Feature Factory" loop. Their teams demo new features, stakeholders politely clap, and everyone goes back to their silos feeling productive. But a nagging question hangs in the air: Are we actually moving the needle?
They see talented, expensive teams working hard, but can't connect that energy to real product outcomes and business results. It’s a frustrating place to be.
The promise of focusing on Outcomes
Evidence-based management offers an alternative. Focus on traction towards outcome-oriented intermediate and strategic goals. But when you try to bring this approach into a "Sprint Review," it often falls flat in practice.
Here's what I hear from most product leaders I work with:
We can't have a meaningful conversation about customer behavior and outcomes days after we ship a feature. Measuring business impact will take even longer. We have no real data yet. And no idea if we've made a dent. That's why we discuss what we can discuss: the output. The features.
To get out of this loop, you don't need to blow up your Sprint Review. You just need to recognize it has its limits and complement it with a different, more powerful conversation.
The Problem: One Meeting, Two Competing Jobs
The confusion comes from asking one meeting to do two completely different things:
- Inspecting the Work: This is about the Increment. Did the team build a high-quality, working piece of software that meets the goal of the sprint? It's a tactical, team-level conversation that's crucial for momentum and quality.
- Inspecting the Product: This is about the Product. Are we making progress toward our intermediate and strategic goals? Is the needle moving on our key business metrics? Based on market evidence, are we still confident in our direction? This is a strategic conversation.
When you force the strategic conversation into the tactical container of a Sprint Review, the tactical always wins. There’s not enough time, the data isn’t ready, and the focus is on the last two weeks, not the next three months.
What I'm finding helpful is to decouple reviewing the increment from the product/strategy.
The Fix: The Strategic Product Review
Instead of trying to cram a strategy session into the end of a sprint, the key is to create a dedicated space for it.
What is the Strategic Review About?
It's an opportunity to focus on traction towards your intermediate and strategic goals.
To review your product and business KPIs. To develop insights and steer strategically.
What's the right timing for a strategic product review?
I've found the most effective timing for a strategic product review is in the middle of your planning cycle. (Mid-quarter for most teams ). Here's what I found helpful about this timing:
- It Decouples from Planning Pressure. The meeting isn't squeezed between reviewing last quarter's results and finalizing next quarter's plans. This creates the space for real, unhurried strategic thought.
- It Allows for Mature Data. If you're still releasing to market on a cadence, this gives you enough time to measure outcomes/behaviors and even impact.
- It Informs the Next Plan. The insights you generate here become high-quality inputs for the next quarterly planning cycle. You’re steering with data, not just guessing.
This is the forum where your Product Managers/Owners can step up from being backlog administrators to becoming true Product Leaders. Their job isn't to present a list of shipped features. It's to think bigger:
- Our strategic goal is to increase new user activation by 15%. Here's the traction we're seeing so far. Here's our hypothesis on what input metrics matter the most if we want to move this needle.
- Here's what the evidence shows about the current value the product is providing. We're happy with customer satisfaction and engagement broadly, but do see a specific type of customer cohort that isn't engaging at the levels we would like to see.
- Here's why we believe that's happening. Here is the experiment we want to run. Or the additional evidence we will collect.
- Our hypothesis was that a simpler onboarding flow would reduce the drop-off rate in activation. The evidence suggests that's not the case. We've learned that the real drop-off is happening elsewhere.
- Based on this, the most significant opportunity we see is X, which we believe represents a significant chunk of potential revenue." (Unrealized Value)
As a Product Leader, your role in a strategic product review isn't micromanagement; it's leadership. It's your opportunity as a leader to coach your people, to help connect their work to business impact, and to decentralize ownership of the outcomes.
Redefining "Done": From Shipped to Learned
This approach also addresses another common leadership frustration: trying to hold teams accountable for objectives at the end of a quarter when the results of their work are not yet available.
The issue often lies in how we define "done." For most teams, "done" means "shipped." But for a product lab, "done" should mean "outcome delivered and measured."
This is a simple but powerful operational shift. Instead of a workflow that ends at Release, effective product organizations build in a crucial next step: Learning. They explicitly create space to gather data and analyze the impact after the release, before calling the work truly complete.
This is why traditional end-of-quarter reviews often feel like theater. You're trying to grade a test before the answers are in. The mid-quarter Business Impact Review, on the other hand, is an opportunity to review recent Learning, providing you with the time and space to assess the actual outcomes of your previous investments.
How to get started with Strategic Product Reviews
This isn't a massive re-org. It's a change in conversation. You don't even have to commit to running Product Reviews on an ongoing basis.
Could you schedule one review as an experiment? Preparing for it will be a helpful exercise in shifting the conversation and focus in and of itself.
Your review is a mirror. Currently, it may be reflecting a team that excels at shipping features. By creating a separate, dedicated space to inspect your strategy, you can transform that reflection into a product organization that excels at achieving results.
What's the biggest obstacle to having this kind of strategic conversation in your organization? I'd like to hear your thoughts in the comments.
