AI Didn't Kill Agile. It Moved the Bottleneck.
Why the rise of Forward Deployed Engineering is the next agility problem — and how to scale "unreasonable agility" without it eating itself.
Read more →Insights
Making sense of agility, scaling, OKRs, product operating models, and leadership — written from 15+ years in the field.
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Curated reading paths through 15+ years of field writing
AI Activity to Impact
How agile operating principles help organizations actually benefit from GenAI investments instead of just spraying AI everywhere.
All posts →- › AI Didn't Kill Agile. It Moved the Bottleneck.
- › Is Spec-Driven Development a Step Forward or Back for Product Development?
- › AI Coding Moved The Bottleneck
- › From Personal Productivity To AI Operating-Model Change — A Conversation With Zoetis CTO Kumar Venugopal
- › How To Shift From AI Activity and Output to Impact By Focusing on Constraints
Agility Beyond Software
Agile principles applied beyond engineering — to marketing, operations, finance, and the whole business.
All posts → Developing Your Company Like a Product
Treating internal capabilities and transformation initiatives the same way great product teams treat their products.
All posts → Product Operating Model + Product Orientation
Moving from feature factory to product-led — how teams, leadership, and the business need to change to make it real.
All posts →- › Is Spec-Driven Development a Step Forward or Back for Product Development?
- › Spec-Driven Development Isn't Waterfall Unless You're Using It That Way
- › Product Ownership Topology: The Difference Between Flow and Theater
- › Podcast Deep Dive: AI Strategy and the Operating System Mismatch (with Dave West)
- › What should Reviews look like in a Product Operating Model?
Fixing Your Agility
When agile transformations stall, backslide, or never really landed — diagnosing and recovering from agile gone wrong.
All posts →- › Uncomfortable Truths About The Agile Industry's Focus on Vanity vs Outcomes
- › Transformation or Bling? What My Apple Watch Taught Me About Agile, OKRs, and Real Change
- › How To Evade Coordination Tax By Organizing Around Outcomes
- › The Value Of The Feature Factory
- › Expensive Problems >> Principles >> Practices
Leaner Portfolio Management
Getting rid of portfolio theater — funding flows, initiative ownership, and investment decisions that actually create value.
All posts →- › Why Focus on Flow Metrics? The Problems They Help You See
- › Is it a Product Operating Model? Or is it Stage-gates?
- › Tackling Strategy Theater - Fractals To The Rescue (Yet Again)
- › Mastering Organizational Traction Or Portfolio Agility?
- › How To Choose An Owner For a Cross-Organization Initiative
SAFe + Scaled Agile
Making SAFe work in the real world — connecting the framework to product thinking, agile leadership, and actual outcomes.
All posts →- › How ARAS Software Is Agile about How They Scale Agile
- › Tackling Strategy Theater - Fractals To The Rescue (Yet Again)
- › SAFe-ly Scaling an Agile Product Operating Model
- › What is the difference between Scaled Agile/SAFe and a Product Operating Model? (Interview on the Business Agility Now Podcast)
- › When and How To Organize Your Agile Release Trains (ARTs)
Objectives and Key Results
OKRs done right — connecting strategy to execution without creating another layer of administrative theater.
All posts →Latest Posts
Is Spec-Driven Development a Step Forward or Back for Product Development?
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 ·
Why Focus on Flow Metrics? The Problems They Help You See
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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AI Agents Can Now Run Toward Goals — Are Yours Worth Running Toward?
Claude's new /goal feature lets AI agents keep working until a completion condition is met. Every canonical example they show is about output: tests pass, code compiles, backlog empties. What's conspicuously absent is outcome. Here's why that gap matters and what it will take to close it.
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AI Coding Moved The Bottleneck
AI coding tools can make engineering dramatically faster. That does not automatically make the business faster. The constraint often moves to deciding what is worth building, launching safely, getting adoption, and proving impact.
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From Personal Productivity To AI Operating-Model Change — A Conversation With Zoetis CTO Kumar Venugopal
Most AI efforts are still stuck in personal productivity. The interesting shift starts when AI moves from something individuals use around the edges of the process to something that changes the process itself. This is what that shift actually looks like inside a Fortune 500 from the CTO's chair.
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