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 …
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 …
The next time a big consultancy pitches a transformation – let’s say a project to product transformation – ask them how they recommend managing it. And see if what they describe looks more like a Project or a Product. For example, Will they measure vanity metrics or product metrics? It just goes to show how …
How do you manage your cross-organization initiatives? How can we leverage the project to product shift for cross-org work? What can we learn from Scrum Product Ownership?
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 …
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 …
How can an Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) enhance how organizations use SAFe? I had several conversations with product leaders this week where this question came up. Organizations that are struggling with SAFe Theater and want to see much more empowerment, outcome orientation, and evidence-driven decision making and steering. They realize SAFe has helped them …
Persistence Pioneers UI Architects Embedding Engineers Refactor Rebels Sprint Sprinters Integration Innovators Audio Overview Creators Mind Map Builders YouTube Insights Team Scalability Savants Podcast Summarization Squad Knowledge Connectors Can you guess which product these teams are working on? Which of these team names helped you more than others? Let’s say your organization has more “UI …