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.
Hey Reader, Before you fix teams, fix the system they operate in. Most organizations focus their improvement efforts at the team, program, or product level while maintaining the same organizational operating system—how they make decisions, fund work, and measure success. These teams might be using the latest and greatest processes (Agile, Product Model, Lean Startup, take your pick) but they still need to manage countless dependencies. The funding and GTM processes are still following classic...
When Vered and I got married, my father-in-law gave me a very nice watch as a wedding gift. I didn’t wear a watch that often at the time. I wore the watch, but it didn’t transform me. It provided the service of telling the time, but even back in 2004, we had phones that had clocks. And I was and am pretty punctual so didn’t need that transformation. (And when you’re in Engineering/IT leadership, nobody cares about the watch you wear… at least in Israel… ) Don’t tell Eli, but that watch spent...
“GenAI can enable cheaper, faster experimentation / discovery (it compresses the truth curve by reducing the cost of pretotyping style product experimentation techniques)” (Yours truly, in yesterday’s insight on how AI can really help you build better products) This statement seems to have hit a nerve with reader Elad, who is product leader at a cybersecurity scaleup: “Not everyone can do this… New companies, sure. Larger, established companies are knee-deep in mountains of code,...