Making sense of agility, scaling, OKRs, product operating models, and leadership — written from 15+ years in the field.
Curated reading paths through 15+ years of field writing
How agile operating principles help organizations actually benefit from GenAI investments instead of just spraying AI everywhere.
All posts →Agile principles applied beyond engineering — to marketing, operations, finance, and the whole business.
All posts →Treating internal capabilities and transformation initiatives the same way great product teams treat their products.
All posts →Moving from feature factory to product-led — how teams, leadership, and the business need to change to make it real.
All posts →When agile transformations stall, backslide, or never really landed — diagnosing and recovering from agile gone wrong.
All posts →Getting rid of portfolio theater — funding flows, initiative ownership, and investment decisions that actually create value.
All posts →Making SAFe work in the real world — connecting the framework to product thinking, agile leadership, and actual outcomes.
All posts →OKRs done right — connecting strategy to execution without creating another layer of administrative theater.
All posts →
AI accelerates team delivery, but it also collapses procedural complexity. As team-level dependencies thin out, the mechanics of scaling frameworks become optional—but first principles of flow and managing WIP become absolute.
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When AI coding increases the arrival rate of pull requests, asking reviewers to work faster is the wrong response. Use end-to-end feature flow, spec-driven development, and the Theory of Constraints to improve reviewability and business throughput.
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AI isn't killing Scrum, but it is shrinking the team size from cross-functional squads to highly leveraged 1-3 person units. Here is how team-level descaling triggers a fractal collapse of organizational complexity.
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Why the rise of Forward Deployed Engineering is the next agility problem — and how to scale "unreasonable agility" without it eating itself.
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Spec-driven development looks like a step backward if you think of it as requirements theater. But the better frame is that the spec is becoming a higher-level programming language for human intent.
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Flow metrics are not useful because metrics are good. They are useful when important work is slow, blockers show up late, forecasts are fragile, and leaders need a better way to decide what to start, stop, finish, or fix.
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