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.
Manage The Flow On The Feature Factory Before You Shift To a Product Lab
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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 it means to REALLY apply a Product Operating Model (as these folks are) Something in this interaction prompted me to revisit the archives and find a paper I wrote in 2011 to accompany a conference talk on using Flow to address testing bottlenecks. Yes, it’s 2025, but some organizations are still taming bottlenecks. Some of them are still taming testing bottlenecks believe it or not. It’s become trendy to diss the Feature Factory lately. And yes, early adopters of moving from chaos/waterfall to feature factories are right to promote becoming a product-forward, outcome-oriented, and aligned organization. But for many organizations, that’s a couple of levels too high on the Maslow hierarchy. So here’s to Feature Factories. And the Product-forward organizations we can build on top of them. And to 2011 and the Lean Systems Conference in Long Beach, CA. PS I've been experimenting with writing on Substack as well as a way to grow my audience. You can find the full, refreshed 'Using Flow to Tame the Testing Bottleneck' article there. If you're also on Substack let me know so I know what you're up to. |
Scaling w/ Agility
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.
Is Human in the Loop the real goal with AI? It's a starting point, but I think the goal is to shift to Human in the Double Loop Maybe its even bigger than that. Maybe Agentic AI is the path to unlocking Human Agency A leader I talked to yesterday wasn't sure what their work will look like a year from now. We were finishing an AI coaching sprint in which they shifted from chatting with AI and using Claude Code for very specific tasks to unleashing agentic AI on several complex problems,...
Reader, I just wrapped up a great conversation with Clemens Adolphs, co-founder of AIce Labs, for the Scaling With Agility podcast. We dug into a question we both see more and more leaders wrestling with: Why do so many AI proof-of-concept projects look promising on paper, but never scale past the pilot? Clemens and I discussed some emerging practices for dealing with the pace and uncertainty of developing internal AI capabilities. Here are a few of the ideas we unpacked: — How to avoid the...
"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...