Spec-to-Outcome Check: Does Your Workflow End at the PR?
Assess your agent harness for outcome orientation, trustable output, and continuous improvement. Extend spec-driven development through the product lifecycle.
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Making sense of agility, scaling, OKRs, product operating models, and leadership: written from 15+ years in the field.
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Curated reading paths through 15+ years of field writing
AI Activity to Impact
The leadership side of AI: where value is actually leaking, which bets are worth funding, and how to steer them as a portfolio instead of a pile of pilots.
All posts →- › How to Scale Agentic Development by Changing the Work Before the Process
- › How Next Insurance Broke Its Whole Lifecycle Into Agent Skills
- › The Org Chart Won't Disappear. It Becomes the Interface to the Company OS.
- › Agility Might Have Been Waiting for AI
- › How to Measure AI Impact: From Token Spend to Business Outcomes
Agentic Development Lifecycle
The delivery side of AI: what changes in specs, code review, flow, and team shape once agents generate most of the work.
All posts →- › Spec-to-Outcome Check: Does Your Workflow End at the PR?
- › My AI Bottleneck Wasn't Tokens. It Was Finishing.
- › Is Your Agent Harness Still Learning? Check Its Last Updated Time.
- › Agility Might Have Been Waiting for AI
- › How to Leverage Flow Metrics To Accelerate Your Agentic Development Lifecycle
Agility Beyond Software
Agile principles applied beyond engineering: to marketing, operations, finance, and the whole business.
All posts → Developing Your Company Like a Product
Treating internal capabilities and transformation initiatives the same way great product teams treat their products.
All posts → Product Operating Model + Product Orientation
Moving from feature factory to product-led: how teams, leadership, and the business need to change to make it real.
All posts → Fixing Your Agility
When agile transformations stall, backslide, or never really landed: diagnosing and recovering from agile gone wrong.
All posts → Leaner Portfolio Management
Getting rid of portfolio theater: funding flows, initiative ownership, and investment decisions that actually create value.
All posts → SAFe + Scaled Agile
Making SAFe work in the real world: connecting the framework to product thinking, agile leadership, and actual outcomes.
All posts → Objectives and Key Results
OKRs done right: connecting strategy to execution without creating another layer of administrative theater.
All posts →Latest Posts
Insights ·
How to Scale Agentic Development by Changing the Work Before the Process
Next Insurance broke its whole product development lifecycle into agent skills and deliberately kept sprints, roadmaps, Jira and the role split. Why authorship is the first thing to change in an agentic rollout, and how you know when the process change is finally due.
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Insights ·
How Next Insurance Broke Its Whole Lifecycle Into Agent Skills
Shay Mandel's teams turned every step of product development into a skill an agent runs, then told two hundred people to stop writing the artifacts and start fixing the thing that writes them. His account of what worked, what the agents get wrong, and what they deliberately did not change.
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My AI Bottleneck Wasn't Tokens. It Was Finishing.
AI made starting work nearly free. It did not make finishing free: deciding what is worth doing, reviewing, shipping, and closing the loop still cost the same judgment they always did. So the bottleneck moved, and what you get is not more impact but a pile of half-finished threads. I built a personal kanban board for my own AI coding threads and the first thing it showed me was the size of my own pile.
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The Org Chart Won't Disappear. It Becomes the Interface to the Company OS.
AI will flatten parts of the organization, but it won't remove accountability. The real shift is that more of the company's operating logic becomes encoded, observable, and continuously adjustable, and someone still has to own it.
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Is Your Agent Harness Still Learning? Check Its Last Updated Time.
A Lean sensei could tell an organization had stopped improving by looking at one document. In spec-driven development your harness is that document, and the measurement takes one git command.
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