Why Deleting Your Backlog Makes You Ship Faster (CEO Explains)

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.

In 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.

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GUEST

Kevin Östlin - Co-founder & CEO at Andsend

Kevin 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.

Find Kevin:

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinostlin/

- Andsend: https://andsend.com

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TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

02:40 Kevin's Background and Andsend's Mission

05:42 Traditional Scrum and Its Bottlenecks

10:28 Dropping the Backlog and the Jira Tears

16:27 Daily Sprints and Dynamic Product Groups

23:09 How Hypotheses Work in Practice

31:00 Backend Engineers Becoming UI Designers

40:36 Scaling This Approach Beyond Startups

47:02 The Next Challenge for Andsend

49:44 Q&A: Daily Sprint Rituals and Metrics

57:23 Q&A: Testing Ideas and Finding Your Audience

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. 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.

2. Kevin literally cried over deleting his Jira backlog - but they never needed it again. Dropping the backlog forced everyone to form dynamic "product groups" around hypotheses instead of pre-planned tickets.

3. Daily sprints aren't really sprints - they're a mindset shift. Every standup is sprint planning for the day. The goal: get one hypothesis to production per engineer per day, with 2-3 people working as a pair or trio.

4. Backend engineers became UI designers through customer exposure + AI - when you're in customer onboarding calls and have Lovable/v0 to fill skill gaps, you start designing because you feel the problem. They don't use Figma anymore.

5. Evaluation is the hardest part - you can't evaluate Thursday's deploy until next week. Their unlock: qualitative interviews with customers they've built relationships with since onboarding, backed up by session replays and metrics.

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RESOURCES MENTIONED

- Zapplify (Kevin's previous startup)

- Andsend (current company)

- Amplitude (analytics platform)

- Lovable, v0, Bolt, Replit (AI prototyping tools)

- Tesla factory engineering culture

- AWS deployment frequency example

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CONNECT WITH PRODUCT ENGINEERS

Host: Peppe Silletti

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peppesilletti/

Product Engineers Community:

Website: https://productengineers.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-engineers

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SUPPORT THE SHOW

If this episode inspired you to rethink your team's velocity, share it with someone stuck in sprint planning hell. Drop a comment below with your biggest takeaway or tell us about your own bottleneck mapping experiments.

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