The Book
OOPSI is a practical guide for product teams who want to cut through complexity, focus on value and deliver with confidence.
Many books in this space focus on either product strategy or engineering craft, leaving teams to work out for themselves how to connect the two. OOPSI provides the missing bridge: a lightweight, non-prescriptive collaboration framework that treats technical rigour and business value as part of a single, continuous conversation from discovery through to delivery.
By helping teams build shared understanding as work evolves, OOPSI reduces costly rework, keeps outcome thinking visible, and helps teams deliver value sooner.
OOPSI began life in 2015 during a series of conversations with my colleague and friend, Pete Buckney. We were exploring how to help teams navigate the complexity of Agile delivery while keeping the collaboration, flexibility and creativity that make Agile valuable in the first place.
Over the years, the framework evolved through my work with teams and drew on ideas from product thinking, Agile, Lean, Behaviour-Driven Development, Feature Injection, Story Mapping and Specification by Example.
What finally convinced me to write this book was discovering that OOPSI had quietly started spreading on its own. Without any formal promotion, people were introducing it into their own organisations because it helped them make sense of complex work. That was both surprising and incredibly humbling.
I realised it was time to share it more widely.
Why I Wrote This Book
OOPSI helps teams think together, learn together and build together.
What You’ll Get
Inside The Book
A complete walkthrough of the OOPSI framework.
Nine process patterns, each explored through a worked example and supported by guidance on when, who and how to apply OOPSI in different contexts.
The principles behind OOPSI, explaining the thinking that underpins the framework.
Applications of OOPSI, exploring how the framework can be used through the lens of the Cynefin® framework, and applied alongside BDD (Behaviour Driven Development).
The models that shaped OOPSI, exploring the ideas and practices that influenced it.
Three fully worked examples, applied at different scales and in different situations.
Three real-world case studies.
“Jenny has created a beautiful book that every team member should rush out and buy. OOPSI is a a clear and simple approach that helps teams to escape from soul crushing story hell to become a highly valued team collaborating with business partners to deliver customer joy and business success. The genius of Jenny’s book is that it takes a huge amount of complicated advice scattered across the agile community and combines it with decades of her own experience to present a fun and easy to follow guide”
“OOPSI provides a thoughtful structure for collaborative product development that complements the ideas in Team Topologies. By breaking delivery into manageable layers of thinking, it helps teams reduce cognitive load, maintain alignment, and make complexity easier to navigate.”
“Jenny has taken the truths of the past of software engineering, updated them where necessary, and applied them to today’s rapidly changing realities”
What People Are Saying
“As LLMs get better at generating code, we still have the problem of figuring out what code would actually be useful to anyone. OOPSI is a complete toolkit that guides you all the way from business outcomes to detailed, concrete examples that the software needs to satisfy. It helps teams build shared understanding while producing well-structured, accessible living documentation that supports development, testing and future change. Whether you’ve embraced AI coding or not, OOPSI is indispensable for getting everyone on the same page and making sure you’re building stuff that matters. As usual, Jenny has done an incredible job of communicating her ideas in an engaging way that will help you grasp these important ideas easily and get going with them from day one.”
“It’s wonderful to see all the process patterns I love written down in a coherent whole. OOPSI provides a lightweight, comprehensible and pragmatic approach to turning ideas into reality. OOPSI addresses some very common pain points while clarifying and strengthening the flow of work for those of us who have most of the practices in place. I see it fitting well with all kinds of organisations, regardless of their roles and structures or whether they use Jira or Post-it notes. I will definitely be getting copies of this for my leadership!”
Maximise Human Collaboration
Reduce Rework
“Jenny’s book OOPSI is a fresh take on product management. Where most books stay in the world of theory and strategy, OOPSI hands you an actual framework you can apply to new product development right away. What I like most is that it starts with Outcomes. In my own work training product teams, I constantly see that outcomes get pushed to the end of the process, treated as something you measure after the fact rather than something you define from day one, and that’s exactly how products end up as feature factories that ship a lot without moving anything that matters. Jenny gets this right, and the way OOPSI ties outcomes to the rest of the process gives teams a clear line from “What are we trying to achieve?” to “What are we building?”
I also want to call out the book itself, not just the ideas in it. The writing is clear and gets to the point without wasting your time, and the layout, formatting and illustrations make it genuinely easy to sit down and read in one go rather than something you slog through a chapter at a time. I believe a lot of product organizations would benefit from making this shift, both to increase the value of what they build and to cut down on the risk of building the wrong thing in the first place.
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“If your team has ever struggled to connect discovery with delivery, OOPSI: Cut Through Complexity and Deliver with Confidence gives you the map. Jenny has created a framework that meets you where you are, even if that’s user story hell, and guides you toward shared understanding with clarity and confidence. With OOPSI, your team builds shared understanding at every step, using real examples to surface assumptions early, make intent visible, and stay aligned from your first conversation about outcomes all the way through to implementation. This is a book you’ll return to again and again”
“I found Jenny Martin’s OOPSI book easy to read and understand. It strongly resonated with the practices and principles I believe in, and I really liked the way she brings these concepts together. This book offers a practical framework that helps teams become more aligned and work towards delivering customer value.”
Deliver Value Sooner
“AI amplifies the good and the bad. Use the OOPSI framework to get the good, step by step, making progress visible. This book gives your organization the roadmap to succeed. Examples throughout clearly illustrate how teams can collaborate, think outside the box with visuals, understand what users need, and deliver it one small change at a time. That means enjoying maximum benefits from AI.”
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