Untrapping Product Teams Podcast The Hidden Trap Killing B2B Product Teams
Your engineering team just told you they need six months to change a simple dropdown menu.
Your biggest client wants "just one tiny customization" that will require rebuilding half your architecture.
Your sales team promises prospects "we can definitely build that" without asking you first.
What's happening?
You're living the nightmare every B2B product team faces but no one talks about: project stacking.
Here's what everyone is ignoring: Your company has been successful for years building custom solutions for clients. You've grown to 100+ people. Revenue is solid. Leadership thinks you're crushing it.
But underneath, everything is breaking.
You can't ship new features without breaking existing ones. Every "small change" takes months because of dependencies you didn't know existed. Your codebase looks like a house built by 50 different architects who never talked to each other.
The hard truth no one wants to face: You're trapped between being a project company and a product company. And this middle ground is where B2B teams go to die.
Sebastian Borggrewe and Thomas Hartman call this "project stacking" - when companies try to build a scalable product by stacking custom projects on top of each other. You end up with a Frankenstein monster that serves everyone poorly.
This Conversation Changed How I Think About Product Transformation
I've known Sebastian and Thomas for years now. We're all Munich-based product people who share an obsession with helping teams escape these traps. They organized the Just Product conference, where I gave one of my best talks on "Untrapping Product Teams."
But this conversation revealed something most product books miss entirely: the problem isn't in product management. It's in the organization around product.
Sebastian and Thomas are the founders of Product Masterclass and authors of "From Project to Product." But what makes their perspective unique is that they don't just look at product practices - they examine the entire organizational system that either enables or destroys product thinking.
This conversation is pure gold, especially if you’re in the B2B area. This 40 minutes will save you a lot of headaches. Let me give you a glimpse of what you’re getting from it.
10 Game-Changing Insights That Will Transform Your Approach
1. Projects aren't evil - being stuck between project and product is
Projects are not bad... The issue is not with one or the other, but if you get stuck in the middle and you essentially try to develop a product by building a lot of projects on top of each other. - Sebastian
2. Success can be your biggest barrier to change
They think it's very easy to begin with... they have been successful until now. And that's usually the biggest problem."
- Sebastian
3. The segmentation problem starts in sales, not product
B2B companies often take any customer opportunity that comes their way, regardless of fit. This creates a mess that product teams inherit and can't easily fix.
4. Individual contributors can drive bottom-up change
There's only so much an individual contributor can do... But there's also a way to push the ideas bottom up... It takes longer. It definitely takes longer, but it's 100% doable. - Sebastian
5. Write down expectations to level up your negotiation power
It's really important that you write down with the stakeholder what's the expectation once the thing is finished. Because if you wrote down the expectation, you cannot lose anymore.
- Thomas
6. Change requires either pain or strong leadership vision
Most companies don't wake up and decide to become product companies. They change because something hurts or because leadership sees a bigger opportunity.
7. Your roadmap reveals your organizational maturity
Look on your roadmap and just trace back where the requests come from... In product organization, the communication tends to turn around 180 degrees.
- Thomas
8. Product managers can't fix organizational problems alone
The "egg organization" analogy shows why fixing discovery and prioritization isn't enough if the rest of the company still thinks in projects.
9. Stop trying to fix everything - ask how you can help others succeed
Frame it in the sense how from a product perspective can we help you be more successful. And then you will see where the gaps are.
- Sebastian
10. Context matters more than frameworks
Every journey is different. Also, every journey of an organization is different. And also tiny steps make a difference in the right direction.
- Sebastian
Bottom Line: If you're stuck between project and product mode, you're not alone. And you're not doing everything wrong. But you need to understand that product transformation isn't a product problem - it's an organizational design challenge that requires a completely different approach.
Listen to discover the mental models that will help you navigate this transition without burning out your team or fighting your organization every step of the way.
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Have a lovely day, David.
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