Picture this: you've a breakthrough strategic initiative tied to one of your company-level goals that impacts 10 teams across two product groups, as well as your GTM organization. These are all busy, overloaded teams. Those same 10 teams are also juggling five other initiatives. And the business-as-usual whirlwind. You pull this work into the backlogs and roadmaps for all these teams. Fractional slices of people across the teams will work on this. Which means it will take a while. Leaders...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Please don’t write your OKRs using AI. OKRs should reflect YOUR strategy. Your choices. Your strong opinion. Your tradeoffs. What you CAN do is use AI to fix your OKRs. Here are some ways you could go about doing that: Collaborate with AI to create a prompt that reflects your perspective on what makes great OKRs Point AI at an OKR expert you’re following and tell it to create a prompt based on that expert’s advice. (Your OKR Hot Seat with that expert) Point AI at a set of OKR experts and ask...
3 days ago • 1 min read
Hey, You probably noticed that I rarely promote/launch offerings around here. Today is the exception. I’m starting a small peer group (up to 10 people) for product/tech leaders who are working on evolving/ transforming their organizations. This Mastermind was born through conversations with leaders like you who expressed a desire for an intimate peer group with a high signal-to-noise ratio, where they can go beyond theory and dogma and have thoughtful, nuanced conversations about the journey...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Do you ever have nightmares of underpant gnomes running your transformation? Process Theater happens when people focus on following the process instead of connecting it to outcomes and impact. It's like the South Park underpants gnomes, who never managed to figure out the connection between stealing underpants and world domination. So, how can we break the downward spiral caused by process theater and switch to a positive transformational flywheel? Outcome Mapping can help us clarify the real...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Hi there, After years of listening to podcasts, guest appearances, and co-hosting, I’m finally launching my own show: the Scaling w/ Agility Podcast! . Why? I've heard from leaders and practitioners like you that podcasts and audiobooks are where you escape from your inbox and social feed to find nuance, insight, and inspiration. The Scaling w/ Agility podcast is for people like you—leaders and practitioners who are building empowered, scalable organizations - who want to learn from others...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Are you a Head of Product, Engineering, Technology, or Transformation? Are you working to evolve your organization from a Product Theater / Feature Factory towards becoming more scalable, outcome-oriented, empowered, and evidence-driven? If that sounds familiar, you’re exactly who I want to hear from. I’m building a new masterclass for leaders like you- those navigating the messy, high-stakes shift from project/feature delivery to true product operating models, often in founder-led...
16 days ago • 1 min read
I talk quite a bit about the notion of "Developing your company like a product". One of the obstacles I see in the adoption of this concept is that's hard without having the "Developers" and "Product" people that consider the company their product... What I've seen in companies I work with is that there are MANY Ops teams - RevOps, EngOps, ProdOps, DevOps, PeopleOps. Too often these teams are too focused on the respective tools. Worse than that, they are often siloed - optimizing locally for...
17 days ago • 1 min read
On Tuesday, driving back from college, my daughter asked me what Agile is. Here’s what it isn’t. It’s planning to record a video podcast while walking around the block and realizing 15 minutes (and a few kilometers) later that the iPhone camera stops recording video when you switch to a different app (Perplexity, let’s say…). Doh Well, it would have been worse if it had been 60 minutes. And it would have been better if I had recorded a minute, then stopped to review the result and adjust...
23 days ago • 1 min read
Product Model is a pipe dream for organizations still mired in testing bottlenecks and costly stabilization and release processes. I’m here in Belfast this week to provide some advanced Scrum Mastery training (yes, Scrum is Alive!) at a client, and I was invited to deliver a session about Flow while I’m here. As I was working on my talk, some themes related to flow, batch sizes, and feedback loops also came up in the advanced Scrum Mastery conversation as we were trying to unpack some of what...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read