Rooster

Welcome back to my series on actionable experiments you can try as a Product Owner to boost your dev team’s productivity, alignment, and innovation. Each post offers practical strategies to rethink how your team handles their workload and priorities.

Estimating large, future roadmap items can feel like trying to predict the weather next month—there’s just so much uncertainty. The bigger the item, the harder it is to figure out how much effort it will take. And when the item itself is still pretty fuzzy—maybe the scope isn’t fully defined—estimating becomes even trickier. What’s more, estimates usually come from the development team, which can make the conversation feel one-sided and, let’s be honest, sometimes uncomfortable.

After revisiting Team Topologies, I’m left with a lingering sense of unease. Can the approach work? Probably. But will it work for your organization if applied without careful consideration? I’m skeptical.

If you’ve ever struggled to create a roadmap that actually drives meaningful progress, you’re not alone. At Strobbo, I faced the same challenge. I spent a long time searching for the right format, experimenting with different approaches. My journey took me from a cumbersome version that looked more like a project Gantt chart to another where we focused on several strategic goals and the work we planned to tackle. But none of these approaches ever felt quite right.

As the Product Owner at Strobbo for the past five years, I’ve been part of a transformative journey—one that we’re incredibly proud of. Recently, I’ve had the chance to share our story through various publications and collaborations:

A recent publication by Jürgen De Smet and Viktor Grgic on Cognitive load and the recent Org Topologies course I followed, got me reflecting on my role as a Product Owner/Product Manager. We often focus on the cognitive load of development teams, but it’s crucial to consider our own too. As Product Owners, we handle a lot—from talking to stakeholders and prioritising backlogs to keeping the team aligned with the product vision. We too should be managing our cognitive load better, in order to support our teams more effectively and make the whole product development process smoother.