Every product team entering a new year is carrying practices from the year before. Some of them are producing real value. Others persist because stopping them would require a conversation that competes with a dozen more pressing ones. The December TPG Live roundtable spent two and a half hours on the question of how to tell the difference, and what changes when you can.
What became clear across the session is that the practices worth keeping share a characteristic: they survive honest evaluation. The ones that persist without evaluation are often protected by a specific dynamic. The person who would raise the question has less authority than the person who owns the practice. Once that pattern is visible, it changes how you look at everything on the calendar, the roadmap, and the team’s operating rhythm.
From the recap:
Product teams entering a new year face a specific kind of decision that rarely gets made explicitly. The practices that structured last year’s work are still running. Standups still happen at the same time. Backlogs still get groomed on the same cadence. Metrics still get reported in the same format. Most of these routines continue because stopping them would require a conversation nobody has scheduled.
The recap connects four themes into a system: retiring rituals, recognizing anti-patterns, adapting to AI-native product work, and building the environment that determines whether any of those changes hold. The Roadmap to Mastery series arriving over the coming weeks examines the organizational forces, political dynamics, and emotional costs that keep these patterns in place, and what experienced leaders do to change them.
- Read the full recap on Patreon → (for members)
- Join The Product Way to access the recap and the Roadmap to Mastery series → (for non-members)
The Product Guy 