From Agile Theater to Product Breakthroughs: What Biotech Can Teach Us About Running Companies Like Products

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 when leaders at Dyno stopped trying to “install Agile” and instead focused on regaining and improving Dyno’s agility and traction. A key unlock was a workshop where we explored the question “What if we organized Dyno itself like a product?”

That’s essentially the story you’ll hear on the latest Scrum.org Community Podcast with Tyson Bertmaring (COO and Head of Stewardship) and Adrian Veres (CSO). They share how Dyno moved from handoffs and functional silos to empowered, cross-functional teams aligned to clear product goals.

What stood out for me listening back:

• They didn’t copy/paste Scrum ceremonies. They focused on clarity of goals and continuous inspection/adaptation.

• They dared to rip off the band-aid—building scientific teams that combined lab associates, data scientists, and ML engineers around a single outcome.

• They treated the company itself like a product, evolving its operating model with the same empiricism they applied to their science.

That’s the Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) in action. Not Agile Theater. Not “installing a framework.” But developing your company the same way you develop products: set outcomes, test approaches, learn, adapt.

I was fortunate to play a small role early in this journey, nudging the conversation away from agile mechanics towards agility and product principles. The results speak for themselves: faster innovation loops, aligned incentives, and a structure that scales with complexity instead of collapsing under it. (Tyson dives deeper into this earlier part of the journey on a past episode)

👉 If you’re wrestling with silos, coordination overhead, or transformation fatigue, I encourage you to listen to the episode here. And then ask yourself: are we running our org like a theater production—or like a product?