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Kanban does nothing to solve the product strategy and market fit questions and is often applied as a fix-all for much deeper rooted problems. I would also argue that Kanban has the tendency to turn engineers into widget builders and is demotivating. Here, take this tiny piece of work and when you finish it I will reward you with another. Keep your head down and just trust me.

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I would say Kanban is the opposite of keeping your head down - you have to come up for air every time you finish something and priorities can change each time. Waterfall is the classic head-down approach, work on something for months/years and then release it and see if there is still a market for it. I think there are strong tendencies towards waterfall in many tech personalities - "I'm just going to disappear and come back with something brilliant at some unspecified point in the future." People don't want to feel that they're building widgets when they could be making a cathedral but that's often what is needed. Agile and Kanban fight this tendency and are therefore not always popular.

The point I am trying to make is the following: I think you need to do both and that's why building great products/software is hard. You need to see the big picture yet deliver against it in bite-sized chunks. Good PMs and Engs are capable of doing both at the same time. That's the key. Give folks responsibility for owning big ideas and allow them to get their in an agile, incremental way. Kanban really is about the incremental "getting there" part.

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