Blog

Applying Agility to Cross Product Initiatives in a Product Operating Model world

Tackling Projects in a Product Operating Model World – Aka Herding Wildcats Down Waterfalls

Projects and initiatives are second-grade citizens in a Product Operating Model world. The organization worked hard to organize around products, creating empowered product teams, each with its product manager/owner focused on a product goal that hopefully aligns with the organization’s larger strategy. At scale, you might have Product Groups and even Product Portfolios, each empowered …

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Company as a Product

“One of the things that we do differently is that we treat our company as a product” – Jason Fried – CEO and co-founder of 37signals (on Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz) “Culture is a Product. Every company builds two products, one is the product they build for their customers, and the other …

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Transformation Blues – Fighting the nice-to-have cave of pain with Must Have and Case Studies

My clients are often frustrated that their transformation isn’t taking off despite promising results (e.g., outsized outcomes and speed by leveraging agile ways of working in a strategic initiative).  One path that leaders often take is to follow initial promising results with a mandate to follow new ways of working throughout the organization. This is …

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Situational Leadership: Balancing Involvement and Ownership

Meet Fanny. Fanny is the founder of a successful startup. Fanny comes from a product background She starts to feel overwhelmed. She wants to stay involved but understands that even a superwoman like her has limits. While researching how other leaders are tackling this, someone on the VC Portco Slack channel she’s on shared an HBR …

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Lazy engineers leverage the Product Operating Model

“We are a team providing services, why should we care about this new Product Operating Model?” Meet Yuval. Yuval is an engineer on the IT networking team. They are a shared services team responsible for the organization’s networks as well as helping application teams in his organization get their applications working in production. It is …

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Insights from Developing The Code / Operating System For My Business

I’ve been spending some time working on my business recently. It’s time for some dogfooding and drinking my own champagne. I’m spending quite a bit of time in my Lean Canvas (actually pondering several different ones), working on deep Ideal Client Personas (aka Dream Clients, Lighthouse Clients), using my Personal Kanban much more, and thinking …

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“OKRs S&%k, but we don’t know anything better” – Scaling Founder Mode by Fixing OKRs

“OKRs S&%k, but we don’t know anything better” This was a direct quote from a cybersecurity scaleup’s Chief of Staff, but I hear the sentiment way too often from founders, chiefs of staff, COOs, and others in the scaleup ecosystem. I started encountering OKRs when working with scaleups a couple of years ago, helping leaders …

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Scaling Founder Mode

Founder Mode is all the craze these days. But here’s what I’ve seen: micromanagement doesn’t scale. Founders obsessing over ALL details? Is that the only way? What I like about Founder Mode is that it addresses head-on a problem I’ve been seeing for a while—the divide-and-conquer approach to scaling. The way managers are taught to …

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From Fingerprints to Frameworks: NEC’s Agile Journey with Scrum and Kanban

The journey for NEC with Scrum, Kanban, and agility illustrates the effectiveness of these practices in transforming complex, real-world environments. By starting small, defining their products, having greater focus by having teams understand what their products were, and engaging leadership in transparent decision-making, NEC addressed immediate operational challenges and laid a strong foundation for sustained growth and innovation. Being pragmatic and approaching their agility journey with an agile mindset was key to enabling this sustainable, sticky change in a hectic, high-stakes operational environment. 

Check out NEC’s agile journey in this recent episode of the Scrum.org Community podcast, where Scrum.org’s Dave West interviews Steve Lizotte, VP of Engineering at NEC, and Yuval.

Mastering Agility Podcast – Lean Portfolio Management and OKRs with Yuval Yeret

In this conversation, Jim, Sander, and their guest, Yuval, discuss various topics, including SAFe, lean portfolio management, and OKRs. They explore the misconceptions and polarizing nature of SAFe, the difference between a traditional PMO and a lean portfolio, and the challenges of managing different ways of working within a global organization. They also delve into …

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