Ever get the feeling you’re the “agile person” in the room—brought in to run ceremonies, fix Jira boards, or play Scrum cop, but never actually invited to shape real strategy? If that hits close to home, you’ll want to listen in on my latest conversation with Michael Gerharz. Michael’s a computer scientist by training, but …
Picture this: you’ve a breakthrough strategic initiative tied to one of your company-level goals that impacts 10 teams across two product groups, as well as your GTM organization. These are all busy, overloaded teams. Those same 10 teams are also juggling five other initiatives. And the business-as-usual whirlwind. You pull this work into the backlogs/roadmaps …
Please don’t write your OKRs using AI. OKRs should reflect YOUR strategy. Your choices. Your strong opinion. Your tradeoffs. What you CAN do is use AI to fix your OKRs. Here are some ways you could go about doing that: Whatever way you create this prompt, I like to save it as context, for example, …
Picture this: You’ve invested in a framework, maybe rolled out Agile, SAFe or OKRs , and your teams are “following the process”. But despite all the activity, the promised business impact just isn’t showing up. Sound familiar? If so, you might be caught in Process Theater – a situation where everyone’s performing the rituals, but …
Are your strategic themes gathering dust like unused New Year’s resolutions? If you’re investing significant energy evaluating initiatives but your enterprise themes seem vague, unconnected, merely decorative, or too restrictive, you might suffer from “Strategy Theater.” The frameworks these organizations use prescribe a strategy artifact. But the leadership team responsible for it hasn’t boarded the …
You’ve paid for that product license. JIRA Align. Copilot. ChatGPT. Maestro. Pendo. Gong. ServiceNow. Snowflake. Cascade. Monday. Clickup. (Engineering|Product|Rev|Whatever) Ops. IT. Take your pick. OKRs. Scrum. Agile. SAFe. Force Mgmt. The latest framework/process you’re deploying. Now you’re trying to maximize the usage of that product/process. You want to show ROI. You create playbooks of what …
What’s the future of Agile? Agility? Agile as a career choice? Yesterday, I joined Jonathan Stark on his podcast Ditching Hourly to discuss the current state of Agile as a platform, how it has evolved over the years, and what practitioners should consider as the platform matures. Jonathan primarily focuses on advice for freelancers/consultants on …
Alice wants her product organization to adopt a product operating model because she believes it’s the future of working. She’s been an early adopter of agile and lean startup methods and is constantly looking for better ways to work. Bob wants their product organization to adopt a product operating model because they have an expensive …
Back in 2006, calling my product delivery organization a factory would have been a compliment. We were struggling to deliver predictably. Quality was such a big issue that I joked about asking one of our QA engineers to take a vacation during our final hardening week so that we would have a chance to get …
Engineers excited about LLMs, Agentic AI, RAGs, spending time going to the vendors, playing around like kids with new toys. Without a real problem in mind. Without the ability to deploy any of it in the organization (the engineers don’t talk to the legal folks much…) Can you think of where so much time and …