You're Agile. So Why Are You Still Building the Wrong Things?

You're Agile. So Why Are You Still Building the Wrong Things?

Your team ships every two weeks. Your velocity is up. Your retrospectives are on the calendar. And yet, somehow, you're still building features nobody uses.

The Delivery Delusion

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most companies have solved the wrong problem. Over the past twenty years, I've watched hundreds of organizations master agile delivery. They've hired Scrum masters. They've trained teams on story points. They've measured velocity, tracked burndown charts, and celebrated sprint completions. They've become incredibly efficient at building software.

The problem? They're building the wrong thing!

This reality isn't a failure of agile. Agile does exactly what it promises: it helps you build things faster and respond to change. The issue is that agile was never designed to tell you what to build. It's a delivery framework, not a decision-making framework. And that gap could be costing you millions.

What Agile Doesn't Solve

Let me paint a picture you've probably lived through. Your product team comes back from a customer visit with fifteen feature requests. Marketing wants a dashboard that looks like your competitor's. Sales needs three integrations to close a big deal. Leadership has a vision for an AI feature they read about in a TechCrunch article.

You were perfectly agile. You just built things that didn't matter.

So you do what agile-trained teams do: you prioritize, you break it into stories, you estimate, you plan sprints. You deliver all of it on time. Six months later, usage data tells the real story. That competitor-inspired dashboard? Almost nobody opens it. Those integrations? One customer uses them. The AI feature? It confused more users than it helped.

You were perfectly agile. You just built things that didn't matter and fell into the feature factory trap. High output, low impact. Lots of activity, little value.

The Missing Layer

A Product Operating Model is the system that sits above your delivery practices. It's how you decide what to build before committing resources to its construction. Think of it this way: agile practices live in the execution layer. They answer, "How do we build this?" 

But two critical questions come before that:

1. What should we build next? That's discovery.

2. Why does it matter to our business and our customers? That's strategy.

Most organizations have one of these three in place. The best organizations integrate all three into a continuous cycle.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Strategy sets direction. It's not a static annual plan. It's a living answer to "where are we going and why?" It connects company goals to customer problems. It defines the outcomes you're chasing, not just the features you're building.

Discovery tests assumptions. Before you commit to building, you validate whether the solution will actually solve the problem. You talk to customers. You prototype. You run experiments. You learn what works before you scale what doesn't.

Delivery builds and ships. This is where your agile practices shine. But now they're focused on solutions you've already validated, aligned to outcomes you've already defined.

The magic happens when these three practices inform each other continuously. Strategy shapes what you discover. Discovery validates what you deliver. Delivery reveals insights that refine your strategy. Without this integration, you are left with chaos. Teams build features because they're on a roadmap, not because they solve problems. Roadmaps fill up with ideas that never got validated. Strategy becomes PowerPoint slides that don't connect to daily decisions.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Example 1: The Payment Flow Nobody Wanted

A SaaS company I worked with spent three months building a new payment flow. They did everything right from an agile perspective. Daily standups. Two-week sprints. Regular demos. Clean code. On-time delivery. The new flow had five steps instead of three. It collected more data. It had better error handling. The team was proud of it.

Conversion dropped by 18%.

What went wrong? Nobody validated the assumption that customers wanted more steps or more data fields. Nobody tested a prototype. Nobody talked to customers who abandoned the checkout process.

They were agile. They just skipped discovery.

After we implemented a discovery process, they learned that customers wanted fewer steps and faster checkout. The team built a simpler flow in half the time. Conversion went up by 23%.

Same team. Same agile practices. Different approach to deciding what to build.

Example 2: The Integration That Unlocked Growth

Another company had an integration request from a single enterprise customer. The agile approach would have been to prioritize it based on deal size, estimate the work, and build it. Instead, they used discovery. They interviewed ten other customers in the same segment. They learned that eight of them needed the same integration. They also discovered that these customers had three other common problems that the original request didn't surface.

The strategic insight? This wasn't a one-off customer request. It was a signal about an underserved segment.

They built the integration. But they also built solutions for the three other problems. That single discovery effort led to a new product tier that became 30% of their revenue within a year.

The agile delivery was the same. The business outcome was completely different because discovery happened first.

How to Start Integrating Discovery and Strategy

You don't need to burn down your current system. You need to add the missing pieces.

Step 1: Add assumption mapping before every build decision. Before committing to building anything, write down your assumptions. What problem does this solve? For whom? How will we know if it works? If you can't answer these clearly, you're not ready to build.

Step 2: Create a weekly discovery rhythm. Set aside time each week for customer conversations, prototype testing, or data analysis. Make discovery a regular practice, not a special project. Even two hours a week changes everything.

Step 3: Connect your roadmap to outcomes, not features. Reframe your roadmap around the problems you're solving and the metrics you're moving. Features become hypotheses about how to achieve those outcomes, not commitments carved in stone.

Step 4: Run small experiments before big builds. Before you spend three months building something, spend three days testing the core assumption. Build a prototype. Run a fake door test. Interview five customers. Validate before you scale.

Step 5: Review delivery results against discovery predictions. After you ship, compare what happened to what you predicted during discovery. Did usage match your hypothesis? Did the problem actually get solved? Feed these insights back into your next discovery cycle.

The Real Question

The companies I see winning aren't just faster. They're smarter about what they build. They've stopped measuring success by how much they ship and started measuring it by how much impact they create. They've moved from "did we build it on time?" to "did it solve the problem?" Agile is essential. But it's not enough.

The real question isn't whether you're doing standups and sprints. It's whether you're discovering what matters before you deliver it. Because you can be perfectly agile and still be a feature factory. The only difference between efficiency and effectiveness is knowing what to build before you build it.

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If this article resonates, I write about product operating models, discovery practices, and building what matters every week. Follow along for practical frameworks you can use with your teams.