How planning a refresh of a portable garden cart at Lake Roland park became a lesson in systems thinking

What the Rally Report taught me about why Product Operations work either justifies itself or doesn't. There's a persistent critique of Product Operations as a discipline: that it creates process where none is needed, produces artifacts nobody asked for, and inserts a layer of overhead that good product teams shouldn't require. The critique has some merit. I've seen it play out. Process for its own sake is real, and it's wasteful. But I've also seen what happens when the criti