One of the key Kanban practices is Limiting Work in Progress. If you want to be pedantic, what this practice actually aims to do is reduce and stabilize Work in Progress. This improves flow, provides predictability, and is actually even more important for creating a pull-based Kanban system than visualizing your workflow using a Kanban …
Navigating the opportunity-rich environment of the AI age – when your company is considering dozens of “finding AI gold” initiatives – requires discipline AND product-orientation. I’m working with a PMO leader to develop a product-oriented portfolio management approach in an organization with deep roots in pharma, chemistry, and hardware development. Meaning an ongoing clash between …
You scaled your team to 60+ engineers. You installed the “industry standard” frameworks to keep everyone aligned. For a while, it worked. But lately, it feels different. PI Planning has become a ritual people dread. Innovation cycles have turned into “dead zones.” Your teams are spending more time managing the process than shipping code. You’re …
Why the “professional management” playbook needs a dose of empiricism. Many leaders install a Business Operating System (BOS)—such as EOS, Scaling Up, or OKRs — and achieve significant improvements in execution discipline and traction across their organization. They set annual goals, break them into quarterly “Rocks,” and execute on them. Many leaders are discovering that …
Growth is supposed to feel like acceleration. For most companies with 50-500 employees, it feels like wading through mud. You added people, more layers, and “responsible adults.” But instead of getting faster, you got slower. Predictability is down, and coordination overhead is overwhelming your top talent. I was discussing this exact problem with Dave West …
Executives keep hearing that “95 percent of AI projects fail.”The truth is uglier: it’s not the models that are failing, it’s the management operating systems we’re using to leverage them. Most organizations treat AI like a project — scope, budget, work breakdown structure, milestones. But looking for ways to leverage/operationalize AI is prime example of …
Do you feel inspired by becoming an empowered product organization, but are unsure of the concrete steps to take to initiate the transformation? What You’ll Learn: This is for you if you’re:
Show me your Review sessions and I’ll easily tell you whether you’re a process theater, feature factory, or product lab. How do you switch from a feature factory to a product lab? From an organization managing projects and plans to one focused on traction towards outcomes and business impact? You change the focus of your …
Lately, I’ve been exploring the concept of the flywheel idea. Jim Collins wrote about it years ago, but I see more leaders rediscovering it in practice. When a flywheel works, each turn makes the next one easier. Activities reinforce one another, and outcomes compound over time. The opposite is the doom loop. That’s when every …
When I first started working with Dyno Therapeutics—a Boston-based biotech tackling the gene therapy delivery problem—it didn’t look that different from many scaleups I’ve seen. Brilliant scientists, tons of funding, cutting-edge ideas. But also the antipatterns that creep in with scale – silos, dependencies, and a growing sense of “process theater”. The turning point came …