I talk quite a bit about the notion of "Developing your company like a product". One of the obstacles I see in the adoption of this concept is that's hard without having the "Developers" and "Product" people that consider the company their product... What I've seen in companies I work with is that there are MANY Ops teams - RevOps, EngOps, ProdOps, DevOps, PeopleOps. Too often these teams are too focused on the respective tools. Worse than that, they are often siloed - optimizing locally for...
3 days ago • 1 min read
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...
9 days ago • 1 min read
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...
16 days ago • 1 min read
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...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
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,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Engineers excited about LLMs, Agentic AI, RAGs, spending time going to the vendors, playing around like kids with new toys. Without a real problem in mind. Without the ability to deploy any of it in the organization (the engineers don’t talk to the legal folks much…) Can you think of where so much time and energy is spent on a technical innovation without connecting it to a real problem? Of course you can… Mobile, Cloud, Big Data, just to think of a couple of recent examples. To be honest, I...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
How can an Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) enhance how organizations use SAFe? I had several conversations with product leaders this week where this question came up. Organizations that are struggling with SAFe Theater and want to see much more empowerment, outcome orientation, and evidence-driven decision making and steering. They realize SAFe has helped them evolve from charos towards a stable “Feature Factory”, and they are now setting their aim for becoming a “Product Lab”. If this...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Persistence Pioneers UI Architects Embedding Engineers Refactor Rebels Sprint Sprinters Integration Innovators Audio Overview Creators Mind Map Builders YouTube Insights Team Scalability Savants Podcast Summarization Squad Knowledge Connectors Can you guess which product these teams are working on? Which of these team names helped you more than others? Let’s say your organization has more “UI Architects” or “Persistence Pioneers” than “Knowledge Connectors” or “Youtube Insights”. What does it...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Ever feel like your product organization is stuck in the mud? You’re not alone. Many teams start strong, laser-focused on delivering value and achieving product-market fit. But as success scales, things get messy. Dependencies pile up, alignment fades, and suddenly, you’re running a feature factory instead of an empowered product organization. Why Do Product Organizations Stall? Here’s the typical lifecycle: Early Days: One team, minimal dependencies, clear goals. It’s all about finding...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
