Field Notes · Elle Anderson · andersonco.uk

Field note · Product leadership

Why I Started Anderson & Co

I did not set out to run a consultancy. I set out to lead digital transformation, which meant making products people genuinely love to use and helping businesses disrupt themselves before the industry or a competitor could. Somewhere along the way, the way we worked became as important as the work, and that pulled me into a world I came to find frustrating. This is the story of why, and what I built instead.

How I Ended Up in the Agile World

When you lead transformation, the method is not a detail. How you change a business decides whether the change holds. So, reluctantly, I became a strong advocate for agile ways of working, and I waded in to make sure that what I knew was sound. I took the certifications. I kept going, into business architecture and the scaled ways of working that large organisations need when one team's method has to become fifty teams' operating model.

I also found myself in classrooms being taught by people who had never written a line of code, never shipped a product and never led a department. So I tried to contribute from the inside, because why not learn from someone who had. What I found was that the certifying bodies wanted the curriculum kept narrow: the process of delivery, and only that. Anyone who followed me in my enterprise coaching and business architecture years will remember the debates.

What the Loop Left Out

The agile boom produced a great many consultancies, and most of them were selling the same thing. A delivery loop. Sprint, review, repeat, at the lowest planning horizon a company has. Product owners who were really backlog clerks. Teams told they owned discovery and delivery, with no idea how to do both. The loop was the whole religion, and the thing it was meant to deliver had gone missing.

Here is what was missing. Product sense: knowing whether a product makes sense for the people who would use it, the market it would enter and the company building it. Discovery and user research, which I care about more than almost anything in the job. The testing of real hypotheses against real needs, which is the only honest way to find out whether a value proposition is true. And the whole lifecycle of a product, from the first bet through growth to the day it is quietly cannibalised by its successor. None of it fitted in a two-week box, so none of it was taught.

Product Is Lineage

Ask me what product is and I will draw you an evolution chart. One product at the top, its ancestors underneath, each born of the last.

Apple did not build the iPhone. It built a computer with a point of view, then a music player that taught it to make small, beautiful devices at scale, then a store, which was not a device at all but a business model bolted to one. The phone was three ancestors in one object, and it promptly ate the music player. The tablet took the low end of the computer's business and did not apologise. The wearables are satellites of the phone, each one making the ancestor in your pocket harder to leave.

That is product. Not a backlog. A lineage across three planning horizons: the business you run today, the business you are building and the business that will replace it. Every serious product organisation is working all three at once, whether or not the slides admit it. The sprint board lives on the first horizon. The people selling the loop had never paused to look.

I drew the chart properly. It is free to print, and it ends with three questions for drawing your own: what pays the bills today, what is that an ancestor of and which one will eat which.

Who Should Own What

The other thing the loop could not teach was ownership, because ownership is an organisation problem and the loop only knows about teams. A whole industry had been built by people who had never had to decide who should own what, or watched Conway's law turn a sensible reorganisation into a train wreck because the system boundaries and the team boundaries disagreed. I had. I have drawn team boundaries without looking hard enough at the systems underneath, and watched the architecture quietly rebuild itself around the org chart within a quarter. I have also stopped it happening, which is harder and worth more.

That is why, in everything I do with a product organisation now, ownership comes before structure, and the operating model comes before the method.

A Good Leader Is a Coach

What those years taught me, more than any framework, was that a good leader is a coach. Manager as coach is not a soft skill bolted onto the job. It is a whole modality and a leadership style, and it is the one that turns capable people into leaders. So I studied executive coaching properly, with the International Coaching Federation, and it became the spine of how I lead, how I train and how I coach.

So I Started a Company

Anderson & Co exists to work on the whole thing: product at every planning horizon, from the hypothesis in a customer interview to the portfolio decision in a boardroom, with discovery, research and delivery done by the same people, properly, inside an operating model that can carry it.

The "& Co" is literal. For each engagement I assemble a small team of the best people I know for that specific problem, and nobody else. No bench, no juniors learning on your budget, no one in the room who is not needed. Anderson & Co is me, and the right company for the job.

I am still working on product across the UK and Europe, which, it turns out, was the job all along.