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.
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...
What’s the future of Agile? Agility? Agile as a career choice? Yesterday, I joined Jonathan Stark on his podcast Ditching Hourly to discuss the current state of Agile as a platform, how it has evolved over the years, and what practitioners should consider as the platform matures. Jonathan primarily focuses on advice for freelancers/consultants on ditching hourly billing through positioning, productized services, and pricing advice. If, like me, you’re a freelancer/solopreneur agile...
Alice wants her product organization to adopt a product operating model because she believes it’s the future of working. She’s been an early adopter of agile and lean startup methods and is constantly looking for better ways to work. Bob wants their product organization to adopt a product operating model because they have an expensive problem—they were brought in to help scale a product organization. With 12 product teams working on a line/portfolio of products, there’s little consistency,...