Any stakeholder management framework is ineffective if there is no trust between you, as a product owner, and your stakeholders. Trust is challenging to gain, resourceful to maintain, and very easy to lose.

For stakeholders, you represent your team, your product, and your organization. If they don't trust you and consider you an unreliable partner, then it is a chain effect with a downward spiral.

How to build and then maintain that trust? It is straightforward - deliver expectations. If you can't deliver, then manage those expectations.

Should we let users know about upcoming features? Can it make them angry if you tease them and then underdeliver?

Let's find out.

While reading Julius Caesar’s biography by Adrian Goldsworthy, I learned a surprising fact: he funded his political career as a startup would today.

Caesar was from a very noble patrician family. However, at the moment of his birth, his family was not incredibly rich and powerful compared to other Roman nobility. They have significant connections, but that alone would not be enough to build an outstanding political career.

The Roman political system was not characterized by parties but rather by individuals. Those individuals spent a large amount of their money to gain popularity among the citizens, support their lifestyle, engage in what we today consider bribery, and so on.

The Temptation to Say No​

I saw on LinkedIn a rare opportunity for 2025: a vacancy for a Junior BA. I wondered whether hiring someone for such a junior position makes sense, considering the current level of AI advancement.

My immediate answer is ^^NO^^: as a Product Manager managing a portfolio of products, AI could do the same work as a junior Business Analyst does. And sometimes, with a better quality and less involvement of someone who needs to guide that person.

Let's discuss the statement above, because the answer is not as simple as it may seem.

Composable Definition and MACH​

Composability, also known as Composable solutions or Composable commerce, is a design principle in which individual components or services are modular, independent, and interoperable. It allows them to be easily combined, reused, or replaced to build complex systems.

We have a custom-built core product for software businesses, whether a monolith or a set of microservices. In addition, you (when I mention you, I mean a product, area, or organization) have several external integrations with different levels of complexity.

For non-software businesses, several vendors of different scales have some in-house solutions. Those businesses are the primary beneficiaries, as Composable is a way to eliminate vendor lock-in and gain more control while also being flexible enough to adapt to market changes.

Composable addresses the latter case by using "best-of-breed" components available, whether market or house-built and adapting them according to business requirements.

To build such a miraculous system, you need middleware that connects several headless subsystems via API and provides governance and data consistency.

There is much buzz about whether AI could replace human product managers. I am not very concerned. Much of my work involves dealing with stakeholders at different levels and pursuing various objectives. AI will find it challenging to substitute that side of people interaction. I mean politics in a sense of power dynamics among multiple groups of stakeholders.

We don't like politics in the workplace, but it is inevitable when there are more than a dozen people.

Dealing with internal or external stakeholders always involves politics and personal-professional relationships. The larger the organization, the more complex the political landscape and the bigger the stakes.

The power dynamics impact everyone in the organization, including individual contributors. When an individual contributor (IC) transitions to a manager role, they become a part of the game without any choice.

Another year is almost over, so it is time to summarize all that happened and discuss what is coming. First, let me wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year before I dive into self-reflections relevant only to a few readers.

Achievements​

In 2024, I published 24 articles, including 7 editions of the BArszawa blog, where I acted as a writer and an editor. That's two times more than in 2023.

Here is the next blog edition of our Business Analysis Community in Warsaw: BArszawa Blog #7 (December'24)

What is inside:

A new chapter in the Requirements & API series continues uncovering API design specifics. This time, we look closer into IDLs (Interface Definition Languages).

I examine OpenAPI as an industry standard, Microsoft-powered rival TypeSpec, and an underdog JSight. They have a similar purpose but achieve that in very different ways.

For future plans, please don't create one-liner tickets in your backlog.

The only excuse is when you must "proof" some future work. I knew a project manager in an outsourcing project who told business analysts to create 500 Jira issues to showcase to a customer the scope of work for continuing a development team's assignment.

In recent years, I have been dealing with massive backlogs of outdated items written by people no longer around. That has resulted in painful and time-consuming reviews and (re)-negotiations with stakeholders.

If you have such experience at least once, you are likely a fan of focused and precise backlogs like myself.