The Illusion Was Rational

Chapter 4: Portfolio Labels That Do Not Exist in Code

“Fake products” carry all the governance artefacts of a real product but have no boundary that corresponds to anything in the system. For an audit committee chair, a fake product is a capital allocation that cannot be traced to a productive unit.

The product review is held monthly, each product owner presenting to the CPO and a panel of senior stakeholders. The owner of “Customer Engagement” presents third: a funnel, a set of KPIs, a roadmap colour-coded by quarter, fluent and confident. Customer Engagement is growing, retention is improving, and the team delivered twelve features this quarter.

Then an enterprise architect asks, “Which services comprise Customer Engagement?” The owner begins to answer, then pauses, and it becomes clear that Customer Engagement is not a system but a label applied to features spanning four services maintained by three teams, two of which report into a different product area: the notification service is shared with Operations, the recommendation engine sits inside a legacy monolith nominally owned by Transactions, and the analytics pipeline runs on infrastructure a platform team recently reorganised.

The question requires a forty-five-minute sidebar, in which a delivery lead draws boxes on a whiteboard that no one will photograph, and by the end no one in the room, including the owner, can draw a coherent boundary around Customer Engagement. It has a P&L, a headcount allocation, and a roadmap; it does not have a boundary that corresponds to anything in the system. The review continues, nobody suggests the product definition might be the problem, and the action item is for the owner to “work with architecture to clarify the technical landscape.” It will be deprioritised within two weeks, which is itself a form of clarification. The architect's question is diagnostic, and every software-dependent corporate has a version of this problem.

A fake product is a P&L label with no executable boundary. It has all the governance artefacts of a real product, ownership, funding, a roadmap, quarterly reviews, KPIs, but no boundary that corresponds to anything in the system that creates and delivers value. It was defined by market narrative or portfolio taxonomy rather than by a coherent business process that could be owned, executed against, and measured, and when reality refused to conform, the organisation inserted a translation layer rather than revisiting the definition: a product owner tasked with making the incoherent appear coherent.

Boards can identify fake products without looking at code; the symptoms are visible in governance artefacts.

The boundary question fails. When “which services comprise this product?” requires a forty-five-minute sidebar, the product has no boundary. The architect's question was a governance question, not a technical one: whether the thing being funded and measured corresponds to the thing being built.

...

See also: Full contents · Preview chapters · Illusions of Work