{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Product Engineers Podcast","title":"Why Deleting Your Backlog Makes You Ship Faster (CEO Explains)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3133,"description":"What if your entire sprint cycle fit into a single day? Kevin Ostlin went from running traditional Scrum with a perfect Jira backlog to deleting the whole thing and watching his team ship faster than ever. As co-founder and CEO of Andsend, he's built an organization where backend engineers design UIs, everyone talks to customers, and the team deploys more than one feature per engineer per day.\nIn this episode, we explore why they mapped their bottlenecks and found 40 days per week lost to handoffs, how daily sprints became their new normal, and why Kevin now thinks of engineers as product managers leading armies of AI agents. This isn't about going faster for the sake of speed—it's about closing the loop between customer pain and shipped solutions.\n---\nGUEST\nKevin Östlin - Co-founder & CEO at Andsend\nKevin is a founding engineer turned CEO who previously built Zapplify, a sales automation platform that reached thousands of customers before he shut it down to pursue a new mission. At Andsend, he's building an AI relationship agent for consultants and freelancers while experimenting with a product engineering model that eliminates traditional bottlenecks.\nFind Kevin:\n- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinostlin/\n- Andsend: https://andsend.com\n---\nTIMESTAMPS\n00:00 Introduction and Welcome\n02:40 Kevin's Background and Andsend's Mission\n05:42 Traditional Scrum and Its Bottlenecks\n10:28 Dropping the Backlog and the Jira Tears\n16:27 Daily Sprints and Dynamic Product Groups\n23:09 How Hypotheses Work in Practice\n31:00 Backend Engineers Becoming UI Designers\n40:36 Scaling This Approach Beyond Startups\n47:02 The Next Challenge for Andsend\n49:44 Q&A: Daily Sprint Rituals and Metrics\n57:23 Q&A: Testing Ideas and Finding Your Audience\n---\nKEY TAKEAWAYS\n1. They mapped 40 days per week lost to bottlenecks in a 9-person team - designer handoffs, product manager meetings, code review delays. That exercise made the problem so obvious they had to act.\n2. Kevin literally cried...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/8v5L1kod14AJua78aUC9VQ4Z3kRWRHsqmocpC-JMNJs/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS83ODc1/YTcxMTE2YjVlYjYy/MTBjZTBjZTVjZDIy/OTNkMS53ZWJw.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}