“Can we just start with day 2? (Fast forward the WHY/WHAT)”If only I had a dollar for every time I heard this statement in an agile workshop (and was smart enough to invest in NVDA at the time…) Even before we became addicted to short-form content, we never had the patience for the history lesson that most of these agile workshops started with. Workshops morphed to spend more time on practices and less time on principles. A side effect of this widespread focus on the HOW is that more and more practitioners and leaders are think they don’t need workshops or formal training anymore. They can learn the HOW on their own, from a book, from AI, or from free videos. The result? Whether it’s due to shallow HOW-focused training and materials or just skipping the training, We’re seeing people who practice without understanding the WHAT and the WHY. Without a solid grasp on the Intent, It is hard to adapt to the context. The other extreme is also far from ideal. The whole “Agile is Dead” movement is “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” (what Ron Jeffries called “We tried $baseball$ and it didn’t work” – replace $baseball$ with XP, Scrum, SAFe, POM) What’s an alternative to focusing on the HOW?Here’s what how I bring both Principles and Practices together, in a way that is intent-driven and context-aware. It starts with getting the organization unstuck (whether already “using” Agile or not). I often start with this exercise:
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You could do this on your own for self-reflection or together with colleagues. (Having some external expertise to challenge your assumptions doesn’t hurt…) In my experience, after identifying what principles will be beneficial, exploring the practices/patterns available to instantiate these principles is a much healthier, fruitful conversation. PS My focus on Enterprise Kanban and, later on, Portfolio Agility emerged after seeing how often traditional portfolio-level processes/behaviors/metrics are lurking under the surface, inhibiting the agility of these organizations I was trying to help. Read How To Start A Conversation About Agility On Your Browser Reminder: I'm hosting a live Portfolio Agility Q&A on Thursday at 11:00am ET. I look forward to answering your questions regarding the WHY, WHAT and even HOW of Portfolio Agility (and even SAFe LPM). Click here to register Yours, Yuval "Why over How" Yeret |
Are You Struggling to Scale Your Organization ? Need agility but dubious of process BS/dogma? I share reflective, pragmatic, principled takes on how to approach scaling your organization leveraging the essence (rather than theater) of product operating models, agile practices and frameworks, and business operating systems such as EOS and OKRs.
"Instead of Portfolio Management - Just Create Product Teams" - Have you heard that before, Reader? While I understand the angst against Portfolio Management Theater as a solution to Agile Theater... And while I agree wholeheartedly that the north star is to descale by reorganizing around value I find reality a bit more nuanced....Most leaders I encounter can't "just create product teams" their way out of decades of complex products and systems. None of them are Jeff Bezos - they don't have...
Product development concepts come in handy every time you're developing something. Whether that thing is software, product, or even a point of view. The first sentence in this email is a point of view (POV). I want this point of view to be effective - I want people to understand what I mean, be intrigued by it, take action, and hopefully see me as a thought leader / expert in this space that they'll want to follow / listen to more. It took me a while to develop this point of view. To carve a...
Context is King You’ve probably encountered this term in the context of AI. You won’t get far with AI, even with amazing prompting techniques, if AI doesn’t have the right context. Many people focus on the Data aspect of context – what’s in our CRM, in our collaboration tools, in our ERP, in any of our vertical systems. Another interesting aspect is the intent – what are we trying to achieve? What is our strategy? What problems are we focused on? Who are the players? Some of that information...