How People Cope

Chapter 4: Fake Products and the Buffer Class

Some products exist in strategy decks but cannot be located in the codebase. The “buffer class” of product managers absorbs the incoherence these fake products produce, growing larger as the gap between narrative and system widens.

The monthly product review is meant to be a moment of accountability, each owner presenting to the CPO and a panel of senior stakeholders.

The product owner for “Customer Engagement” presents third. His slides show a funnel and a quarterly roadmap, and the narrative is confident: retention is improving, the team has delivered twelve features.

Eventually the enterprise architect asks precisely which services comprise the Customer Engagement domain.

The room shifts. The product owner begins to answer, then pauses. Customer Engagement, it turns out, is a label applied to features spanning four different services rather than a system. 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 maintained by a recently reorganised platform team.

By the end of the sidebar, no one in the room can draw a coherent boundary around the thing called Customer Engagement. It has a P&L, a headcount allocation, and a roadmap, but no boundary that corresponds to anything in the system.

The review continues. The action item is for the product owner to “work with architecture to clarify the technical landscape,” and it will be deprioritised within two weeks. Customer Engagement continues to exist as a product, and the question the architect asked is not raised again. One of the most damaging consequences of separating “the business” from engineering is the creation of products that do not exist.

Fictional products of this kind have names. They have roadmaps. They have owners. They have funding. They appear in strategy decks and portfolio views. They are discussed as if they were real entities with behaviour, boundaries, and agency.

When someone tries to locate a supposed product within the operational system itself, it quickly dissolves into ambiguity.

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