Hiring a PO to keep the backlog and sit between the business and the developers? You're optimizing a circuit that is already obsolete. This piece takes apart the split between those who think the product and those who execute it: why it degrades quality, why a backlog cannot ground a profession, and why AI removes the last excuse for living with it.
You leave a meeting with an action plan, yet nothing has truly been settled. This is what I call a soft decision: a non-decision dressed up as consensus. Organizations often prefer it to a genuine judgment call because it preserves the appearance of agreement without making the loss visible. This piece explores why the mechanism is rational in the short term, and why it costs so much at the execution stage.
Your teams leave the meeting aligned—and each walks away with a different version of the decision. The problem isn't a lack of meetings, it's the absence of shared objects. Glossary, one-pager, PR/FAQ, ranked metrics, decision log, escalation rules: these tools don't produce alignment, they force disagreements to become visible before they turn costly.