“Agile is so great we need to use it for EVERYTHING” “Agile is so much overhead, we stopped using it for ANYTHING” Are you also trying to navigate what to do with Agile? Whether it’s worth the overhead? After years of helping a diverse group of organizations figure out where and how to use agile methods, here's what I've learned... If you want the TL;DR version - Agile has the potential to shine when …. There’s enough risk and uncertainty to justify the overhead of frequent feedback loops....
9 days ago • 1 min read
Founders know that scaling their company to Unicorn status requires extending beyond a singular focus. Launching a product extension. Complementing your established Go-to-market motion. Entering new markets (Different ICP, Geography, etc. ) Often, companies approach these extensions using the same processes they use for their established Products/Markets. They approach a new product opportunity with unwarranted conviction. They go into a new market using established/scaled revenue operations....
13 days ago • 1 min read
What's mature - working well? What have we been sticking to that we should rethink? How are our reimagining efforts going? What are some new ideas we've been thinking about? Are there any ideas we decided to invest in but haven't had the chance to do anything about yet? What's the traction/progress on new initiatives we started? These are questions from the EcoCycle Planning technique that you could use to reflect on your product/s, business, life... For example, let's say you are a...
17 days ago • 1 min read
Reader Kevin had this question about Cross-Product Initiative Ownership:"How should we choose an Initiative (or Epic) Owner when multiple parts of the organization will be responsible for delivery?" That is a good question that often comes up in the trenches when I'm helping organizations apply product-oriented agile thinking to cross-organization initiatives. Here's how I think about it: Initiative Ownership is about the Why and the What more than the How. Ask yourself - who is the best...
19 days ago • 1 min read
A primary focus of mine these days is helping Leaders who want to shift their organizations from a project to a product mindset figure out how to scale their product orientation to a multi-product environment. They want to apply product thinking to their strategic initiatives that extend beyond the product organization. This is what we refer to as Product Portfolio Management. A few weeks ago, I joined Dave West and Darrell Fernandes on the Scrum.org Community Podcast to help answer key...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
What do you do when a product team’s capabilities aren’t aligned with strategic priorities? This is a common challenge for product/portfolio leaders. On the one hand – a product-oriented operating model talks about empowered, stable product teams. On the other hand – we want to focus on maximizing outcomes. What if a product is good enough? How would we even know? And how would we know whether we have a flexibility/alignment issue? Because this is such a tough predicament, in many cases, the...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
The idea of bringing dependent teams together to collaborate better and minimize cross-dependency overhead isn’t new. It's a fractal of the pattern of an agile cross-functional team, which Agile hasn’t invented either, just leveraged. Whether you call these Tribes, Scrum of Scrums, ARTs, doesn't change the essence - Organizing around value. Here’s how you might go about it: Examine your work – what’s on the roadmap, what’s the vision, etc. – and how it will hit the different teams/groups in...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
For the fun of it – the next time a big consultancy gives a big presentation to your organization, pitching a POM – ask them how they recommend managing this transformation. And see if what they describe looks more like a Project or a Product. For example – Will they measure vanity metrics or product metrics? It just goes to show how tempting these vanity metrics are. How hard it is to talk about the real WHY (especially when the WHY is because a big consultancy firm sold us on it…) How...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
When implementing agile portfolio management, leaders’ first—and often most daunting—question is: “Where do we start?” I’ve taught my share of frameworks. In some cases, a comprehensive blueprint or roadmap makes sense. They feel safer to people from traditional project/program management – who ARE often the exact people leading the move towards agile ways of working, especially at the portfolio level. But this sense of safety and predictability is often misplaced. It comes with the baggage...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read