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.
Transformation or Bling? What My Apple Watch Taught Me About Agile, OKRs, and Real Change
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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 many years in a safe drawer. And my left wrist got a nice tan, comparable to the right wrist. Fast forward to 2019 or so, I decided to get an Apple Watch for myself. The Apple Watch DID transform me. It’s “Close Your Rings” feature had the outcome of me paying much more attention to how much I move (or not), exercise (or not), and stand (or not). I chose to heed the nudges to “Close My Rings” and started to stand, move and exercise more. I don’t always close my rings. I have better days/weeks and not so good ones. I could make it an Apple Watch Close Your Rings Theater. But I strive to level up over time, rather than regress. Here’s the thing… The work management tools and practice you’re using are very much like my Apple Watch. Kanban/Agile/OKR/Scrum/Post Its/Liberating Structures/SAFe/Product Model CAN transform you. It can also be fancy bling theater. Yours, |
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.
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...
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...