Editorial note: Edited for readability from local ASR and diarized into speaker turns.
The friction around safe / scrum
Adam Mattis: Welcome to Business Agility Now, the podcast powered by Scaled Agile. I’m your host, Adam Mattis. This is the place to get advice, stories, and perspectives to help you work differently and build the future. Thanks for listening and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Yuval, welcome back.
When was the last time we did this? Was it at Summit or did we do something in person last year online? I’m trying to remember.
Yuval Yeret: It was online before that. Great to be here.
Adam Mattis: It’s crazy to see how many episodes we’ve actually put out. I think last year we did close to 70. I mean, that’s just the long ones, not the short ones. So it’s crazy how much content we’ve put out. And then I consider this is my fourth year doing it. Well, there’s a whole lot of audio of me talking out there.
And is this our second or our third time together? Well, at any rate, for those of you that may have not heard the last time: Who the heck are you?
Yuval Yeret: That’s a very good question. Some days I think of myself as the Agile Maverick or the SAFe Maverick kind of walking outside the lines.
I’m a SAFe Fellow and Professional Scrum Trainer based in Boston, three kids, and I help organizations that are trying to apply agility at scale in weird environments leverage the approach that makes sense.
Adam Mattis: Let’s talk about weird. What constitutes a weird environment?
Yuval Yeret: One of the first marketing organizations that tried to apply agility at scale, designing razors, applying it to accelerate FDA approval for drugs - those are some weird, off the beaten path environments.
Adam Mattis: That is definitely a weird one. My sister right now is working with the FDA through the patent office, approving new research methods and uses of organic material in the production of drugs. I say that very slowly because it’s weird. I’m not sure I understand it exactly, but for those unique contexts that you’re working in, there’s a reciprocal group of people doing equally weird things in the pipeline.
Yuval Yeret: Right now I’m helping a big FinTech figure out enterprise portfolio agility using product orientation. So that’s not that weird. I think that’s a repeating pattern. Sometimes it’s weird; sometimes it’s just helping people do good work.
Adam Mattis: From your perspective, what’s the difference between a bank and a FinTech company? Where’s the line? What says, like let’s say Bank of America, is a bank - what’s the difference between them and a FinTech in your perspective?
Yuval Yeret: Good question. I don’t know that it’s the formal definition, but I see it as organizations where financial technology or using technology is the main driver for finance. I guess banks will become fintechs or are already fintechs, while those organizations are the upstarts in this space.
Adam Mattis: Yeah, I think that’s the line I would draw. It’s the companies building the new way of managing financial data and financial resources versus the companies adopting those new things. For the most part, most existing banks and insurance companies are maybe doing some innovation on their own, but not the big evolutionary things.
Those typically come from the outside and then are either acquired or licensed.
The notable exception - and this one still blows my mind - USAA owns the patent for mobile check deposits. So for every single mobile check deposit that happens on any bank’s application anywhere in the US, USAA gets a little slice of that penny. It’s pretty cool.
So let’s talk a little bit about products. Working in FinTech and working in a lot of the interesting spaces that we all do, we’ve talked a lot about product for years. In my opinion, the discipline of product management is older than anything that we do in tech. If you think of consumer products and the ideas of building a product line, understanding the market, and getting meaningful products to market at a profitable price point, that art is old.
It’s not new. Actually, I first learned product management outside of technology.
I was working for a consumer products company, Under Armour, and I learned the whole art and science of product line management - understanding a collection, understanding market research, competitor research, and just all of the things that go into product outside of tech. And I think as technology becomes more central to organizations instead of just that weird thing that sits over in the corner in its own operating unit, the concept of how we manage tech is what’s new.
So in your travels around the world and some of the interesting clients that you work with, what are some of the things that you’re seeing? What is new and interesting in 2025 versus what was there in 2019?
Yuval Yeret: One of the things that I’m seeing is more and more organizations that have gone through the agile transformation the first time around and didn’t really pay attention to the product orientation piece are waking up.
We’re seeing more and more IT organizations realizing there’s more to agility than just managing your projects in an agile fashion. They’re realizing that in order to really deliver outcomes and deliver the value on your agility, you need to orient teams around outcomes to have them really relate to the business that they own and empower them.
That’s a trend that we’re seeing much more out there today than in 2019.
I’ll actually go back to 2020, where I started working with Gillette. Gillette was looking at how to use agile and a scaled agile Scrum approach to designing a new razor and commercializing it - not just the R&D piece, but everything around it.
You spoke about product management in consumer goods companies. You can imagine that the organization that came up with the term brand manager knows a thing or two about product management. That was a fun exercise teaching these people about product ownership, which is different, but there are a lot of things that they taught me.
Adam Mattis: In all honesty, my perspective on product ownership and product management comes from my understanding of category management. It’s different terms, but it’s the same concept: breadth versus depth. You might have a category manager, aka a product manager, who has a broad perspective of the entire solution - in my context, footwear, apparel, accessories, and how that relates back to the overall brand strategy.
They have breadth of perspective versus the product line manager or product owner who has depth of knowledge within that category.
Yuval Yeret: I wish! That’s what we want to see as SAFe Fellows - people that really understand how the framework should be used.
Adam Mattis: I’ve seen that at Nike and in some of those other companies, and that’s just how they work. That’s the exact dynamic that I would love to see most other companies embrace as they go down this path of product management. These things aren’t brand new; they’ve been well-proven for a lot of years.
Let’s just go learn from them instead of trying to argue about the nuance of this versus that and all the methods that people get into hot debates about.
Yuval Yeret: If we look at an organization like Gillette or other consumer goods companies, when you look at the way they manage their portfolio, they manage a lot of projects. And because they manage a lot of projects, even for these organizations that are experts at product, they struggle with the notion of creating an empowered team that owns that product.
There’s ownership of the product, but the work that happens on the product is spread very widely throughout the organization. So it’s hard for people in the trenches doing the work to actually focus on the product and do right by this product. It’s hard to even find one person that owns a product end-to-end, like the model that you described.
And the same is happening in IT. In IT, we manage projects, and because of that, those projects pull people. A lot of the time, because we’re afraid of choosing to work on fewer projects and afraid to actually change teams to own products, we end up with all these threads around multiple products and even product owners that don’t really own products.
Adam Mattis: In tech, what we see is that decision-making authority and even content authority is spread across multiple layers of management. In a lot of organizations I’ve worked with, whoever owns the P&L by definition is actually the product manager because they hold all decisions. They hold all financial data.
They hold anything that relates to a check.
And then by the time that’s diluted through their management chain down to a product manager, the product manager becomes a feature scribe. They don’t actually do the research. They don’t have decision-making authority. They’re just writing the features that someone tells them to. And then that distills to the product owner, where the product owner is not making decisions about their product; they’re just writing some stories and trying to prioritize them based on what they’re told.
That’s the biggest challenge I see in enterprise contexts: people have the role title, but they’re not doing the role as it’s intended. And things don’t move as fast as intended because decision-making authority is centralized. When you think about the history of tech and the Tayloristic Jack Welch model for how many tech organizations are still run, that makes sense because people are afraid to give up decision-making authority.
At every turn, we’re still not really good at quantifying how IT contributes value to the organization. We still look at it as a cost center.
What is really happening in the system
Adam Mattis: So these P&L owners in IT are essentially IT relationship managers trying to justify why we fund their organizations every year, so they’re afraid to give away that authority. And by the way, the people that they’re building products for - in a lot of organizations, you have to have a different badge to get to the floor where those people are.
They work within a different operating unit and they’re not easy to talk to.
It’s a systemic problem. It’s not that we don’t have the ideas and mechanisms for how to address it; it’s that from an organizational design standpoint, it’s a lot harder than just waving a wand. One of my very first clients in this space back in 2013 had nine independent operating units where the central unit was a services entity meant to be revenue zero, where IT sat.
It took 12 years until this year for them to finally integrate their operating companies and say, “We’re one company; we no longer have these walls.”
So when we talk about how we intend things to work, people are quick to say, “Oh, well, that doesn’t work because it’s not working.” But the why is so much more complex.
Yuval Yeret: One thing that I’ve been thinking about as we were talking through this: the fact that we’re calling people product owners when they’re actually backlog owners - what’s the effect of that from a change management perspective?
Would it be more transparent to have another name in Agile and SAFe for the situation where you’re not really a product owner, where you do the relationship management and own a backlog, but to clarify there’s a threshold at which you become a true product owner?
When you’re a true product owner, you have deep expertise and you own a leading indicator. You own something that can really make an impact all the way to an internal or external customer. If we had that, maybe it would help us see where our organization is and take action towards becoming a bit more product-oriented.
Adam Mattis: In your travels this year, you’ve run into conversations around the product operating model. Do you feel like the product operating model conversation is starting to change perspectives?
Are people starting to look at how they approach product differently? Are you seeing good conversations as a result?
Yuval Yeret: It depends. We’re both consultants - it depends! Some conversations are better. There are people that really use it to look differently at what they’re doing. It reminds me of the conversations I’ve had with people around Scrum when we started teaching them Kanban. It’s not that it’s dramatically new - pull is part of Scrum, pull is part of Kanban - but by providing that lens, you start to recognize some things.
By talking about product orientation, you start to really understand what we mean by organizing around value: assuming variability, preserving options, focusing on outcomes where the features might change. People even start to think differently about PI planning once they start to talk about product orientation.
Having said that, I also encounter organizations where the product operating model is just the newest shiny object silver bullet that they use to explain to themselves why the previous thing didn’t work: “SAFe didn’t work for us, let’s use the product operating model.” Is it really going to help if we’re just going to call our teams of teams ‘products’ and start using a different lingo if we’re not willing to really tackle what’s broken?
That’s what I see more often than not when a company uses product operating model as an excuse to sell another consulting gig.
Adam Mattis: We’ve seen that with all the work we’ve been doing for a long time. The struggle is using different terms to do the same things you’ve always done without changing behaviors.
So from what you’re seeing, if you had to describe the product operating model, what does it look like? What are some of the really cool things that it brings to the table?
Yuval Yeret: An emphasis on empowered product teams is one of the biggest things that the product operating model brings. Teams move from working on a book of work or a set of features to having an outcome defined: “This is the outcome that we want to achieve; now we have the freedom and flexibility to figure out how.”
That’s not anything new if you really look at agile principles and SAFe principles - they cover all of that. But it doubles down on these things. It’s harder to ignore those things when you’re following a product operating model. And it also emphasizes steering with confidence: being clear about the assumptions you’re making, what the bets are, and managing to those bets.
Adam Mattis: That doesn’t sound too dissimilar from the intent of a lot of the tools that we have. We talk about how the most important thing coming out of PI planning is your objectives: what’s the value we’re going to deliver?
Then we negotiate what features we might deliver to achieve that, with the goal of doing as little work as possible to maximize this outcome.
The same thing with iteration goals: This is what we intend to deliver over the next iteration, and the stories are how we might get there, but it’s not a commitment to the backlog. Where a lot of people get sideways is committing to specific features. If this expands the conversation to put a higher emphasis on maximizing the amount of work not done, building the right thing, and focusing on outcomes, that sounds like a pretty big win.
Yuval Yeret: Let’s just be honest about it though. There are a couple of other things at play. One is the people selling product operating models - especially evangelists - have an interest in showing that their thing is the best and throwing mud at other things: “Our thing is only good if the other thing is bad.” That’s the dynamic out there.
Another thing is it requires doing SAFe and Agile well to be product-oriented. It’s an opportunity to improve how organizations do agile and SAFe. Right now, for example, I’m working with an organization that is using SAFe as the way to actually instantiate the product operating model, and most of it is SAFe.
Now, there are some things we need to think about. Yes, the commitment in PI planning is around objectives, and the purpose of PI planning is to align rather than to plan in detail the entire PI. But it’s a slippery slope for a lot of organizations; it’s so easy to fall back to our previous behaviors of wanting to plan in depth.
We as a community in SAFe can use this product-oriented movement as an opportunity to both emphasize what we already say and reflect on sacred cows like PI planning: can we reimagine them to be more outcome-oriented than task lists?
Adam Mattis: I think that’s natural. There are still steps to get to any of this that have to be done first. You can’t just have a product-oriented planning horizon if you’re not good at understanding what your products are and your architecture is not good. Enterprises argue and fail to align on what their products even are.
And if our architecture is still a mess - if we haven’t embraced continuous delivery, automated, and cleaned up our house - it’s going to be hard to have good focus on product. We have to be good at DevOps, CI/CD, automation, and really aligned about what our products are, aligning our teams around delivery of value through those products.
The practical shift
Yuval Yeret: I’ll add one more thing to that list. What we’re seeing in that organization - and I’ve seen in others - is that conversations at the portfolio level, if you make them product-oriented, emphasize outcome-oriented strategic themes rather than book-of-work management. If you talk about leading indicators and map those leading indicators to product groups, development value streams, and epics with an eye towards discovery and evidence-based management, a couple of interesting things happen.
First, portfolio leaders start to think in a product-oriented fashion. Even if the organization is not there yet, they start to push it in the right direction. And any behavior we manage to change at the portfolio level is a win for the organization. When we identify leading indicators instead of a book of work, this is a much better way to align teams: “This is what we want you to focus on - not the book of work, but moving the needle on something important to the business.” Those conversations are game-changing.
Adam Mattis: Absolutely. Before that can happen, what needs to change is how people are incentivized. I’ve seen so many times where I’ll speak to a group of executives who say, “You’re absolutely right about all of these things, but my long-term incentive model is based on project throughput.” They’re incentivized to manage the book of work.
No matter how right you are, they’re going to behave based on their incentive structure. That’s one of the things we can learn so much from consumer product companies. There is no category manager or GM incentivized on throughput or managing a book of work; they are incentivized based on category performance, SKU performance, profitability, and market penetration.
What I appreciate about POM (Product Operating Model) is the altitude it comes in at. A lot of agile transformation and SAFe work has been a middle-out process where it comes in with middle management and hits a glass ceiling. The cool thing about POM being walked in by McKinsey and others at the board and executive level is that there’s at least a chance we can have a conversation to change the incentive structure.
What I worry will happen is that the football gets passed to the same middle managers and we get the same outcome. We skip the decision-making layer that has the opportunity to change the system, and we end up in the same place.
Yuval Yeret: I’m already seeing it, to be honest. The question is how to change the game. What I’ve done is use SAFe, Kanban, and Agile to provide a mirror. The mirror shows the organization how product-oriented it is and how good its flow is, or not. Then there’s an opportunity to have a conversation.
The higher you can go up in that conversation, the better the chance you’ll be able to do something about it.
Adam Mattis: When you show up with that kind of perspective these days as an Agilist, how is that landing in the enterprise today?
Yuval Yeret: Being an Agilist in 2025 is not as easy as it was in 2020! It has some sort of toxic connotation these days, so you need to figure out what is the right framing to come in and do the work. Being outcome-focused and helping organizations with ways of working: the outcome for us is a more streamlined organization with better trust.
Adam Mattis: Helping build a mechanism that allows you to test faster, fail faster, and deliver more to the bottom line with greater efficiency. I think the objective has always been the same, but in 2020 when the economy looked very different, it was easy to focus on things that feel good. In the economic context of the last two years, it’s about achieving earnings targets and margins with efficiency because capital isn’t free anymore.
Where we got sideways is that a lot of well-intended people focused purely on emotional, empathetic, and people-focused aspects, and never got good at communicating the value-based aspects.
Yuval Yeret: That’s a big part of it. I also think we’re seeing very different segments in the market. The late adopters of agile ideas - iterating fast, making bets, steering with evidence - need prescription and structure. They struggle to do it well, but they appreciate the need for it. They can’t just take abstract principles.
Then there are organizations that used to be the early adopters. People representing them are frustrated that the movement has gone mainstream, and they don’t appreciate what larger, complex organizations need. A CEO of an organization with decades of legacy code and brownfield architecture can’t just give an edict like Bezos did with the API mandate.
Most organizations don’t have the leeway to do that; they need a way to manage complexity.
Adam Mattis: People always look at tech-native companies and say, “Well, they’re not doing X or Y.” But Amazon’s board had the appetite to say, “We’re fine if you lose money for the next 15 years because we understand where you’re going.” Traditional companies face the opposite: you must increase revenue this year or else.
So they acquire something, don’t have time to integrate it, and pile on technical debt.
There is nothing you’re going to come in and do that will make all problems disappear without doing the hard work.
What leaders should pay attention to
Adam Mattis: If companies don’t slow down to fix their house, they’ll fall further behind. You see car companies like Ford, GM, and Audi recognizing this by standing up independent greenfield subsidiaries to build automotive technology. It’s faster and less expensive than trying to fix their 50-year-old stack.
With insurance companies running systems that are decades old on COBOL, it might be easier to clean your data and start over, because maintaining archaic hodgepodge systems won’t get any faster.
Yuval Yeret: As interventionists - I like that word! - the size of the intervention should be appropriate for the impact of the intervention. Intervening at the foundational layer is hard, so a lot of organizations slap lipstick on a pig. Too often, consultants allow that to happen by renaming existing groups, doing training, and introducing process where process can only help a little bit.
It’s upon us as interventionists to look in the mirror and acknowledge the bang for the buck of our interventions. How can we do good by figuring out the most appropriate intervention - whether that’s seeing how work flows or reorganizing around value - rather than going all-aboard with ceremonies on the same amount of work without changing the game?
I was talking to a big bank in Israel earlier this week. They have a lot of agile routines and have improved throughput, but the business is not seeing the outcome. That is an indication that they’re not product-oriented enough.
Adam Mattis: That reminds me of the consultant’s Hippocratic Oath: If you want help and are willing to do the work, I will absolutely help you. But if you want to blindly pay me to do something that I know is going to fail, I’m not going to waste my time or your money. As consultants, we must understand when to say no and explain why.
To wrap this up: I don’t see a conflict between SAFe and POM. It’s really hard for POM to succeed without the structure of execution, so there’s a natural marriage there. If POM allows us to have conversations at a leadership level that we haven’t had access to before, bring it on. But we must have the discipline to do discovery and measure outcomes against what the client wants.
Yuval Yeret: I wish there was a Hippocratic Oath for SPCTs and consultants.
Adam Mattis: We have a Fellows call next week - I think we should bring that up! Anything you’d like to close with regarding POM or the future of work?
Yuval Yeret: The only thing I’ll mention is that I’ve recently released a trail map - not a road map, but a trail map - giving people ideas as they navigate product-oriented portfolios: the Portfolio Trail Map. It’s a free email course with insights on when and how to make your portfolio more product-oriented.
People are invited to check it out.
Adam Mattis: We will throw that in the show notes so people have access. I’ve seen your trail map and I dig it. Great conversation as always, Yuval. Stay safe!
Yuval Yeret: Thanks, Adam. Great talking with you.