Dave Sharrock and Peter Maddison break down what's driving the shift to AI token economics, why the old "$20 per user" budget model is breaking down, and why usage alone is the wrong thing to optimize for. They dig into the pattern showing up across organizations, where a small share of users account for half the token spend, and why chasing that number down misses the real question: what value did that spend create? The conversation covers KPI traps, model selection tradeoffs, and how to build the kind of honest, open culture that lets you actually govern AI spend without punishing your best people.

This week's takeaways:
- Token usage by itself is a bad KPI once your organization has moved past early AI adoption, because it stops measuring exploration and starts driving the wrong behavior.
- The 10% of users driving 50% of the token spend aren't automatically the problem. Some are generating outsized value, and the only way to know is to ask them directly.
- Managing AI cost well means pairing spend visibility and caps with an honest conversation about the value that spend is producing, not just sorting a table by usage.

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Dave and Peter dig into what they call the organizational immune system: the structures, incentives, and habits that keep a company stable, and that fight back the moment you try to change them. They use the Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merger as a case study in how a shift in incentives can erode a culture built over decades, and how long it takes to rebuild that trust once it's gone. The conversation moves into how AI adoption doesn't fix broken systems, it amplifies the weak spots organizations have been avoiding for years, and forces conversations that used to be easy to put off. They close with a look at how value stream mapping can make an organization's hidden dependencies visible, so leaders can work with the immune system instead of fighting it.

This week's takeaways:
- Organizational structures exist to stabilize behavior, so treating them as barriers to simply remove often creates new problems you didn't expect.
- Real change comes from adjusting incentives and giving people permission to experiment, not from stripping away the systems that hold the organization together.
- AI adoption doesn't repair a broken process, it amplifies existing weak spots and forces the difficult conversations organizations have been putting off.

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Dave and Peter dig into why teams shade the truth when a deadline is on the line, and what actually creates room for honesty instead. They talk about the difference between activity data and real information, why cheap, near real-time visual management beats a hand-curated status report, and why the structure of a status meeting decides whether bad news gets absorbed or gets shot down. They also get into why understanding how work flows end to end matters more than staring at a single date on a calendar.

This week's takeaways:

• Cheap, near real-time visual management pulled straight from your work management systems gives people something honest to talk about instead of a filtered report.
• Structure in status conversations matters because it lets people absorb bad news and adjust instead of reacting defensively, which makes it safer to bring problems forward next time.
• Understanding how work actually flows end to end, not just watching a deadline date, is what shows you where the real bottlenecks and constraints are.

Listen to the full episode at definitelymaybeagile.com
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 Have a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Reach out at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

Peter and Dave dig into a pattern they're both starting to see: organizations using AI-assisted development as a reason to bring back big upfront planning and large project releases. The logic makes a certain kind of sense. If AI can build faster, why not design bigger? But that reasoning skips the part that actually mattered when teams moved to product delivery in the first place: validating that you're building what customers actually need.

The conversation covers why large releases make it harder to learn what's working, why feature parity with competitors is a trap, and what "North Star context" actually means when you're coordinating AI agents. The core argument: the planning layer is back in vogue for good reason, but the delivery layer still needs to be small and iterative. Cheaper to build doesn't reduce business risk. It just makes it easier to build the wrong thing faster.

This week's takeaways:

• AI augmentation speeds up building and releasing features, but it doesn't replace the need to validate whether those features are what customers actually want.
• A big picture plan is useful as context for AI agents and delivery teams, but over-specifying every step upfront wastes time on details that will change anyway.
• The goal isn't projects vs. product delivery. It's combining a clear long-term direction with small, measurable, iterative delivery tied to real outcome metrics.

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In this episode, Peter and Dave talk with Tommy about what it actually looks like to build data products responsibly in a fast-moving AI environment. They get into where humans still need to be in the loop, how compliance has become a competitive signal, and why being nimble matters more than picking the perfect architecture from day one.

Three things to take away from this conversation:

1. Self-agency is real now. If you have a strong conviction about a product or problem, the barrier to building something has never been lower. That's a genuine shift from even five years ago.
2. Security and compliance are no longer just internal concerns. In a world where AI startups spin up overnight, having invested in SOC2 or GDPR signals to customers that you're a legitimate, trustworthy operation. It's a market differentiator.
3. Humans still belong in the system. Not everywhere, but in the right places. For low-risk, deterministic processes, let AI run. For anything client-facing or accuracy-critical, keep a human in the loop. Knowing the difference is the skill.

If this conversation sparked something for you, send us your thoughts at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. And if you haven't already, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one.

In this episode, Peter and Dave sit down with Royce Sin to talk about what it actually takes for AI to stick inside an organization. Spoiler: it's not about the tools.

We get into the tension between flexibility and reliability, why most people are being set up to fail with AI, and what it means to think like a manager when you're not one. Royce also shares his MIND framework, a practical way to think about AI adoption that he developed through hands-on work across enterprise and startup environments.

There's also a good conversation about the trades, no-UI as an ideal, and why the most dangerous move in transformation is knocking down fences you don't fully understand.

This week's takeaways:

• Think of AI as a new type of employee. Set it up for success the same way you'd set up your staff. Design roles and processes to match what it's actually good at.
• Not every rule is a hard rule. Before treating a constraint as a blocker, understand what's behind it. Some fences are load-bearing. Some aren't. Know the difference before you act.
• Don't just bring in AI. Know what outcome you're after. If you can't tell whether it's working, you don't have a tool problem, you have a clarity problem.

Have a thought on any of this? Reach us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

This week's takeaways:

• Labeling the next generation as lazy or unprepared is as old as recorded history. Don't let that bias drive hiring decisions.
• Junior engineers accelerate AI adoption on the teams around them, not just in their own output.
• The questions a new hire asks in their first few weeks are often the most valuable ones your team will hear all year.

Subscribe to Definitely Maybe Agile for weekly conversations on Agile, DevOps, and the messy realities of organizational change. And if this episode resonated, send it to a leader who's thinking about cutting their graduate intake.

Dave ran a workshop at the Global Scrum Gathering in Vancouver for non-technical roles - product managers, Scrum Masters, agile coaches - people who've been told "use AI" but have no clear picture of where to start. What he found is that the problem isn't motivation or technical ability. It's the lack of scaffolding. Give people the right structure and the right room to experiment, and things shift pretty quickly.

The conversation then moves into multi-agent systems - how Dave's team built a group of agents that continuously refresh the workshop itself based on current thinking. Peter adds his own take on testing these systems with personas and automated quality evaluation. It gets a bit technical, but in the best way.

This is a good episode if you're thinking about how to help your organization actually use AI, not just adopt it on paper.

Key Takeaways:

• Context beats generic. Prompts work when they're specific to your role and your actual problems. A product manager needs product management context, not a one-size-fits-all example.
• Think in teams, not steps. Multi-agent systems work best when you treat them like a team reviewing an artifact, each agent checking for something different, rather than a linear build process.
• Don't assume everyone gets it. The gap between people who use AI daily and people who tried it once and gave up is wider than most of us realize. Getting both groups in the same room is where the real learning happens, for everyone.

Have a question or something to add? Reach out at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com or find us at definitelymaybeagile.com. And if you're finding the show useful, subscribing and leaving a review goes a long way.

 Andre Kaminski, Director of Advanced Technology Solutions at WorkSafeBC and author of "The AI-Native Software Development Lifecycle," joins Peter and Dave to talk about what it actually means to rebuild your delivery process around AI, not just bolt it on.

 They get into why optimizing code generation alone is the wrong focus, what the six phases of an AI-native SDLC look like in practice, and why the biggest challenge isn't the technology at all. It's the identity shift that comes with it.
 If your organization is asking "which AI tool should we use?" this episode will help you realize that's probably the wrong question.

In this episode:

• Why AI-augmented and AI-native are very different things
• The compounding learning effect and why early adopters are pulling further ahead every month
• What prompt architecture actually means and why it matters more than code
• How to think about governance when prompts become your new source of truth

 Want to keep the conversation going? Drop us a line at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com or find us at definitelymaybeagile.com. If this episode got you thinking, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

This week's takeaways:

• Intent is always imperfect. Define how you'll validate it, not just what it is.
• Ambiguity in context isn't a bug. It's necessary. Validation is how you confirm you're aligned.
• Drive down the cost of validation, not just the cost of building.

If this landed, share it with someone navigating the same tension. And reach out at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com - we read everything.

Peter and Dave dig into a problem that's older than AI but getting harder to ignore. How does intent get lost as it travels through layers of people, tools, and artifacts? What does a shared context document do that a business case can't? And what can the architectural world teach the product world about keeping the thread from unraveling?

Key takeaways:

• Moving artifacts backwards and forwards through an organization strips out nuance at every step. A single central context document is a more honest way to carry intent from strategy to delivery.
• AI is being actively encouraged in most organizations right now, and in using it, teams may be quietly eroding the ideas behind what they're building without realizing it.
• If your outcomes don't match your original intent, the handoff chain is usually where things went wrong. That's worth looking at before blaming the team.

Try this: Trace one idea from your last strategy session all the way to what actually got built. See if you can find where it changed. Then come tell us what you found at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

What they have is a work-in-progress problem. And those two things call for very different solutions.

In this episode, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock dig into one of the most persistent headaches in organizational management: capacity tracking. Why does the instinct to measure utilization backfire? Why does loading people up to 100% actually slow things down? And what should leaders be asking instead?

The conversation covers the real cost of context switching, why that "nearly done" project is probably further away than it looks, and how AI is making all of this more urgent, not easier.

Three things to take away from this episode:

1. 100% utilization is not a goal. It's a warning sign. 
2. The right question isn't "how much capacity do we have?" It's "how much work in progress can we actually sustain?
3. AI accelerates your breaking points.

If this conversation resonated, there's more where it came from. Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock explore these kinds of organizational challenges every week on Definitely Maybe Agile - the podcast that gets into the real complexity of modern ways of working, without the buzzwords.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or visit definitelymaybeagile.com to catch up on past episodes and reach out with your own questions.

In this episode, Peter and Dave dig into one of the more interesting tensions emerging in 2026: as coding agents take on more of the actual development work, the thing that drives quality output isn't just better tooling. It's better context. Clear, structured, well-owned context that tells agents what you're actually trying to build, who it's for, and what can't be compromised.

Which raises a real question. Who owns that? Where does it live? And what happens when it's missing - which, let's be honest, it usually is?

They get into the rise of "context engineering" as a role, why the name creates its own problems, and what this shift means for product owners, product managers, and the long-standing gap between business and technology teams.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Most organizations have never truly written down their product intent in a structured, usable way. AI is making that gap impossible to ignore.
• Good context drives better outcomes from agents - and the work of capturing, structuring, and maintaining that context needs a clear owner.
• Start asking: what context exists to guide your products? Where is it stored? Who creates it? Who picks it up and moves it through the system?
• The business and technology divide matters more now, not less. You can't afford to throw things over the wall anymore. The two groups need to work closely together, not in parallel.
• What's new here isn't the idea. It's the urgency. These are transformations organizations have been attempting for years. AI is just forcing the issue.

Want to continue the conversation?

If this episode brought up questions about how your teams are navigating the shift to agentic development - or where context ownership actually sits in your organization - reach out at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. We'd love to hear what you're seeing.

AJ Bubb, founder of MxP Studio and host of Facing Disruption, joins Peter and Dave to talk about what actually happens when AI lands in a development team without fixing the system around it. If engineers can't get approvals, can't get access, and spend half their day in meetings, AI just means they produce more output the organization still can't handle. That's not a tooling problem. It's a structural one.

They also get into velocity without direction, what ownership really looks like when a ticket gets blocked, and why synthetic user testing might be the most polite way to avoid talking to actual customers.

This Week's Takeaways

• Own the problem from the customer all the way down. When something is blocked, it's still yours until it moves.
• When an outcome surprises you in either direction, ask whether your model was wrong. Most teams take the win and move on. The ones that improve don't.
• Before reaching for a technical solution, ask why five times. The problem someone walks in with is usually the invitation to a conversation, not the actual problem.

If this episode got you thinking, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a note at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com or leave a review on your podcast app. And if you know someone navigating AI adoption right now, send this one their way.

They dig into how the nature of your work - ordered versus unordered, stable versus volatile - should shape how you plan, who holds decision rights, and how closely your experts need to stay involved. They also talk honestly about the hybrid trap: why trying to be all things to all teams usually ends up serving nobody, and what a smarter version of "borrowing from both" can actually look like.

Real examples from large organizations, including a couple of banks, show just how messy it gets when the model is mandated from the top without enough room for context.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• There is no universal operating model. The right fit depends on your context right now, not what worked somewhere else.
• If your plan is constantly changing, lean toward the product side. If it's stable and predictable, the project side probably serves you better.
• Be intentional about your choices. Ask why you're organizing work the way you are, and how you'll know if it's working.
• Getting an outside perspective matters. It's easy to stay stuck in familiar patterns without someone who can see the system clearly and name what isn't working.
• Get your operating model working before you add AI into the mix. Throwing new tools at a system that isn't working yet just breaks things faster.

Which end of the spectrum does your organization sit on right now - and is it actually working for you? Leave a comment below. We read everything.

They dig into the difference between a project-centric operating model and a product operating model, and why that distinction matters more than most organizations realize. They also get into a concept Peter uses with clients: product owners reduce decision latency, project managers reduce reporting latency. It sounds simple, but the implications reach into how teams are funded, how authority is distributed, and why some transformations stall halfway.

The conversation covers real patterns from the field, including what happens when a technical project manager spends most of his time coordinating 14 dependency groups just so a product owner can get a decision made, and what it looks like when a project-centric funding model quietly undermines a product operating model that was never quite finished.

They also touch on where AI fits into all of this, and where it currently falls short as a bridge between these two worlds.

Three key takeaways from this episode:

1. It's not either-or. Both project management and product management are necessary. The goal is to use each skill set in the right place, not to eliminate one in favor of the other.
2. The relationship between product managers and project managers works best as a true peer-to-peer dynamic. Hierarchy between the two tends to break things down quickly.
3. Be clear about decision-making authority. If your product owners don't actually have the autonomy to make decisions, the role isn't working. And if your project managers exist primarily to satisfy a funding model that doesn't match your operating model, that's a signal to look at finishing what you started.

If this is a conversation your team needs to have, share this episode with them. And if you're finding value in Definitely Maybe Agile, follow the show on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. New conversations drop every week.

In this episode, Logan joins Peter and Dave to talk about what agentic governance actually looks like in practice, why a single consistent layer beats a pile of point solutions, and how to keep developers moving fast without letting things go sideways when it counts.

This week's takeaways:

• Let your teams experiment. That's how you learn what agents can actually do. Just don't skip governance on the way to production.
• Governance doesn't have to be a gate. The best version layers in without friction, and gives everyone in the organization visibility, not just the dev team.
• If a developer has to do extra work to implement a governance feature, that's a design problem. Good governance should work for the developer, not the other way around.

Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock dig into why reliability, not capability, is the real adoption bottleneck right now. They talk through what happens when non-deterministic models get applied to problems that need deterministic answers, why validation and testing are becoming more important than writing the code itself, and how the calculus around decision making is changing fast. If you can build and test something in the time it takes to debate whether to do it, the meeting starts to look like the problem.

They also get into what this means for developers, for leaders, and for anyone trying to figure out where to actually invest their energy right now. The barriers to building have never been lower. That makes the question of what to build more important than ever.

This isn't a conversation about AI hype. It's about what's actually happening at the frontier, and what it means for the way organizations make decisions.

This Week's Takeaways:

1. The barriers to building have never been lower - figuring out what's worth building is now the real work
2. Leadership is shifting toward agency and rapid decision-making, away from top-down strategy setting
3. If you can run the experiment in the time it takes to schedule the meeting about it, run the experiment

If this episode resonated, follow Definitely Maybe Agile wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a conversation. And if you know someone spending two hours debating whether to test an idea they could just build, send this one their way. There are plenty more episodes worth your time at definitelymaybeagile.com.

In this episode, they dig into why acceleration in one part of a system creates pressure everywhere else. When you map the end-to-end journey from idea to live product, you often find 30 to 40 distinct steps. AI is handling a handful of them. The rest? Still waiting on decisions, reviews, and handoffs that haven't changed in years. Development isn't the main blocker anymore. Decision latency is.

They talk through what it looks like when product managers are running parallel experiments and validating ideas in hours, then slamming into unchanged processes for security sign-off, change control, and release management. And why the smartest people on your team are quietly finding workarounds rather than waiting in line, which creates more risk, not less.

This isn't a conversation about AI hype. It's about the real organizational friction that shows up when the pace of work outgrows the systems designed to manage it. And what you can actually do about it.

If your team is moving faster but waiting longer, this one's worth your time.

This Week's Takeaways:

1. Acceleration in one part of the system creates stress everywhere else
2. Map the end-to-end flow before you optimize any single part
3. If it's happening inside your organization, you need to deal with it internally

If this episode resonated, follow Definitely Maybe Agile wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a conversation. And if you know someone sitting at one of those 40 steps wondering why everything feels stuck, send this one their way. There are plenty more episodes worth your time at definitelymaybeagile.com.

In this episode, David joins Peter and Dave to unpack where automation ends, and AI begins, why confusing the two creates brittle systems, and what organizations should actually be thinking about when making investment decisions right now. The short version: don't slap AI on everything.

This week's takeaways:

• Stay optimistic, stay connected, and participate in the change. Don't be overrun by it.
• Automation works brilliantly within its designed boundaries. But unprecedented events expose its fragility in ways we don't always anticipate.
• The shift toward flexible, adaptable robots means the environment no longer has to be built around the machine. The machine adjusts to the environment instead.

Steve works with large companies to improve operational performance through value stream mapping and continuous delivery. But the conversations he keeps having aren't about cutting costs. They're about untethering capable people from the systems that are quietly holding them back.

In this episode, the three dig into why high utilization is often the enemy of good work, how lean thinking applies to knowledge work without losing what makes knowledge work different, and why adding AI on top of a broken system just makes things break faster.

If your organization feels like it should be doing more than it is, this one's worth your time. And if you want all 4 takeaways, don't miss the last few minutes of the episode.

This week´s takeaways: 

1. Step back from the work to look at how the work works. Whether it's a value stream mapping session or a quiet moment of reflection, intentional distance helps you see not just whether the saw is dull, but whether you're sawing the right tree.
2. High utilization is not efficiency. Running people and teams at full capacity removes the slack needed to respond, adapt, and make good decisions. Optimal is closer to 80 percent. The rest needs to be budgeted, not eliminated.
3. Understand your system before adding new tools. Whether it's AI, automation, or the latest framework, bolting new capabilities onto a system you don't fully understand tends to make existing problems worse, not better. Map first. Then act.

Extra Resources:

📖 Tools of Flow by Tody Goldratt: https://www.goodreads.com/es/book/show/75304520-goldratt-s-rules-of-flow

Where organizations once looked up the chain for scaling lessons, now large enterprises are watching small explorers to understand disruption, while entrepreneurs stitch together emerging technologies to solve real problems today. The old playbook doesn't quite work anymore.

We explore what this means for different types of organizations, why pretending to be a pioneer when you're not is a waste of time, and how to actually learn from what's happening in the marketplace instead of just making noise about it.

Key Takeaways:

1. The three-cohort model has flipped. In the AI era, large organizations are looking at what smaller explorers and entrepreneurs are doing, not the other way around. If you're not monitoring the marketplace to understand how others are solving problems with these technologies, start now.
2. Different organizations need different things from the AI landscape. Town planners should watch entrepreneurs for practical accelerators and explorers for early warnings about disruption. Entrepreneurs are stitching together emerging tech with real business problems to create immediate value.
3. Most established organizations aren't pioneering, and that's okay. If you have an HR department and multiple locations, you're not in the explorer space. Innovation labs aren't the same as true exploration. Understand which cohort you're actually in and learn accordingly.

Deb brings a unique lens to technology implementation. She's a former attorney turned project management consultant who specializes in what she calls the "messy middle" – the space between buying software and actually getting value from it. Her secret? Translation. Not just between tech teams and business teams, but between what's being sold and what people actually need to do their jobs.

In this episode, we dig into why user involvement isn't just a nice-to-have (spoiler: shadow IT is alive and well), the difference between being heard and influencing outcomes, and why your C-suite needs to stop treating technology teams like the organizational stepchild.

This Week's Takeaways:

1. Solve the problem before you buy the solution – Understanding what you're actually trying to fix has to come before you start shopping for software. This seems obvious, but most organizations skip this step entirely.
2. Mediation matters more than metrics – When users are involved in gathering information and partially in decision-making, adoption happens. When they're just told what to do, they find workarounds. The question is: how much of that involvement is just making people feel heard versus actually changing what gets built?
3. Outcomes over outputs – On-time, on-budget means nothing if the software gathers dust. Find ways to measure whether you're getting the value you expected, not just whether you hit the deadline.

Want to reach out? Email us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com or visit definitelymaybeagile.com.

Forget the innovation lab. Ivan argues that real innovation happens 10 minutes at a time, every day, at your desk. He shares why learning without outcomes is just an expensive distraction, why retrospectives reveal more than sprint planning ever will, and how the biggest transformation killer isn't resistance, it's apathy.

Plus, the dinner party analogy that will change how you negotiate scope vs. time, and why organizations that obsess over features are asking the wrong questions entirely.

Key Topics:

• Why "nobody cares" is the hardest transformation problem to solve
• The reversed iron triangle: hitting dates by flexing scope
• Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) and structured innovation
• Goals vs. features: reframing conversations with leadership
• Why agile fails when it becomes anarchy

This Week's Takeaways:

• Language and framing matter more than we think. Finding the right words and the right way to present ideas can genuinely shift how change happens in an organization.
• The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving deserves a deeper look. Innovation isn't the big thing happening in the cool kids area; it's the thing that happens every day at your desk.
• The dinner party analogy is going straight into my next executive presentation. When sales want locked dates and fixed scope, this framework shows why that's wishful thinking, and what actually works instead.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

They cover five key predictions:

1. AI moves from tools to organizational capability: Organizations that invest in literacy, governance, and data foundations will pull ahead of those just sprinkling AI on top and hoping for the best.
2. Critical thinking beats prompt engineering: The real competitive advantage won't be writing clever prompts. It'll be knowing when to pause, think through the problem, and decide if you even need the AI in the first place.
3. Product delivery becomes non-negotiable: After 20 years of pushing Agile principles, AI might finally force organizations to actually adopt them (even if they're reluctant to call it "Agile").
4. Businesses return to fundamentals: Just like the dot-com bubble, we're heading toward a moment where the market will care more about revenue, customers, and sustainability than hype.
5. Reskilling becomes a structural investment: Organizations will need to figure out what roles actually look like in an AI-enabled world and invest in growing their people, not just replacing them.

At the end, Peter and Dave pick which prediction is hardest to measure (spoiler: it's critical thinking) and commit to revisiting these in March to see how wrong they were.

If you've been wondering where all this AI stuff is actually heading, this episode cuts through the noise with grounded, practical predictions you can actually use.

Related episodes:

• AI and Knowledge Management with Derek Crager: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1643821/episodes/17360635
• Product vs. Process Innovation: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1643821/episodes/7953100
• There Are No Safe Bets in Business Anymore: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1643821/episodes/17433034

Reach out: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

This week´s takeaway: 

1. Your gifts become your blind spots when overused. That strength that got you promoted? It might be working against you now. The key is recognizing when speed becomes recklessness, when confidence becomes rigidity, or when expertise becomes tunnel vision.
2. Identity shifts are a grieving process. Moving from individual contributor to leader to leader of leaders isn't just a promotion. It requires letting go of the identity you've built your career on, and that loss is real. Give yourself (and others) permission to struggle with it.
3. Skip the woo-woo, ask "why" instead. Self-reflection doesn't have to feel soft or abstract. Simple questions like "Why did I react that way?" or "What role am I playing in this?" are pragmatic tools that work in any meeting, with any team.

Josh explains how HR teams can shift from rushing to solutions toward discovery-led approaches that treat employees as customers. He walks through real examples of iterative onboarding improvements, the importance of understanding jobs to be done in hiring, and why talent density matters more than filling seats quickly.

The conversation explores compensation dynamics, the value of matchmaking over recruiting, and how small experiments can build momentum for broader HR transformation. Whether you're leading people operations or navigating organizational change, this episode offers practical insights on making HR less transactional and more intentional.

Key Takeaways:

1. Start with discovery, not solutions – Before building HR processes or solutions, take time to interview employees, understand their stories and experiences, and map out what's actually obstructing outcomes. Even 10 minutes of discovery beats rushing to a result.
2. HR as a matching exercise, not a numbers game – Recruitment and people management generate real value when viewed as careful matchmaking between what work a company offers and what employees are looking for, rather than just transactional headcount filling.
3. Make HR less transactional – Slow down important conversations around hiring, onboarding, and employee experience. These decisions deserve the same rigor companies apply to external product development, not just checkbox processes.

In this episode, Dave and Peter explore how large language models are changing product management. They go beyond the obvious use cases (like generating user stories) to discuss upstream opportunities: building product strategy, validating market positioning, and testing ideas against competitors.

You'll learn:

• Why documenting your product strategy matters (and why most PMs skip it)
• How to prompt AI to be critical, not just complimentary
• The danger of accepting AI outputs without evaluation
• Temperature settings, context windows, and other practical techniques
• What to do with the time you get back (hint: talk to real customers)

Dave and Peter also share a key practice: write down what you expect before you prompt. This simple step helps you critically evaluate AI responses instead of accepting them at face value.

If you're a product manager, product owner, or anyone building digital products, this conversation will help you use AI as a tool for better thinking, not just faster output.

2. Start Internal, Then Scale Outward: Begin with internal tools that help agents, managers, and executives first. This builds confidence, allows teams to experience the technology firsthand, and creates incremental improvements that build organizational trust. By the time you roll out customer-facing AI, your entire team understands and trusts the system.

3. The best predictor of customer loyalty isn't satisfaction scores or Net Promoter Score, it's the Customer Effort Score. Ask customers, "How much effort was required for you to get what you needed?" after each interaction. Low-effort experiences drive loyalty, and this metric gives you actionable insights into where to improve your service processes.

CONTACT US:
Email: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

Definitely Maybe Agile explores the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale, covering digital transformation, agile practices, and DevOps in enterprise environments.

#AI #CustomerService #Banking #DigitalTransformation #ContactCenter #CreditUnions #CustomerExperience #Glia #FinancialServices #AgileTransformation

Barbara shares her 25 years of experience fixing broken digital transformation projects and reveals why the "juicy middle" of organizations holds the key to sustainable change. We dive deep into mindset training, building internal ecosystems, and why most organizations have forgotten the purpose of half their tools and processes.

From navigating the "permafrost layer" of middle management to understanding why AI initiatives often miss the mark, this conversation offers practical insights for anyone working to transform how organizations operate.

Three Key Takeaways:

1. Meet Organizations Where They Are - Don't force rigid methodologies or terminology. Use the organization's own language and focus on solving their actual problems rather than trying to "fix" them with prescribed frameworks.
2. The Power of Cohorts - Change isn't an individual effort. Building a cohort of four people creates redundancy, moral support, and a self-reinforcing dynamic that can create ripples throughout the organization.
3. Communication is Critical - We don't invest enough in helping leaders develop communication skills. Leaders need ongoing support, coaching, and safe spaces to develop their ability to listen, speak up, and collaborate effectively.

Featured Guest: Barbara Whittmann - Founder, Digital Wisdom Collective

Contact: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

In this raw conversation, Hanna shares the wake-up call that changed everything: a top employee resigning to take a pay cut elsewhere. This crisis revealed the truth about organizational change; you can have all the right processes, but without genuine human connection and psychological safety, your best people will walk.

Whether you're leading digital transformation or navigating organizational change, this episode delivers practical wisdom on building growth-oriented cultures where people actually want to stay.

This week´s Takeaways:

1. Hope Drives Change People with high hope find a way where there is no way. Leaders must tap into this to navigate uncertainty; it's not just positive thinking, it's the catalyst for transformation.

2. Psychological Safety Starts at the Top Growth-oriented cultures need leaders brave enough to say "maybe it's my team" instead of pointing fingers. Cross-functional honesty beats departmental defensiveness every time.

3. Influence > Position Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. You don't need a title to create change; just the will to advocate for your team and drive positive impact.

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The conversation covers the shift from pre-COVID to post-COVID startup communities, why watching customers do their work beats asking them what they want, and the critical difference between handing off your product and handing off your purpose. Hussein also challenges the wall-poster approach to company values and explains why living your principles matters more than declaring them.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Strategy is becoming - Choose who you want to become as a founder and company, then let your thoughts, words, and actions flow from there. It's about the experience you want to have, not just the exit you want to achieve.
• Hand off the product, never the why - Founders can delegate product development once the team understands the purpose behind it. But stay close to customers. That connection informs everything and keeps you from drifting.
• Live your values, don't announce them - Stop putting principles on posters. Instead, have honest conversations with your team about what matters to them, what's missing, and how you'll work together. Build culture through behavior, not declarations.

Topics Covered:

• Why entrepreneurship is really about your relationship with uncertainty
• The founder's role: stay with the customer, hand off the product
• How 80% of features go unused (and what to do about it)
• Why watching customers work reveals more than asking questions
• Building culture through honest conversations, not corporate values posters

💬 Got feedback? Email us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com🌐 Visit definitelymaybeagile.com

In this episode, Dave Sharrock and Peter Maddison tackle one of the BIGGEST challenges facing late-adopter organizations: how to increase productivity and deliver value when dedicated teams just aren't in the cards.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why the "dedicated team first" approach often crashes in traditional organizations
• The hidden dysfunctions and perverse incentives that keep teams fragmented (spoiler: it's about promotions and funding)
• The famous "Sock Factory Parable" explains cross-functional alignment perfectly
• How context switching kills productivity with scarce specialists like DBAs
• Three essential steps to make real progress WITHOUT restructuring your entire organization

The Three Critical Steps:

1. Understand WHY dedicated teams work before forcing the structure
2. Get leadership aligned on real prioritization and trade-offs (not everything can be Priority 1)
3. Create genuine work transparency without status report theater

Whether you're an Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Product Manager, or Engineering Leader dealing with organizational resistance, this episode gives you practical strategies to move forward when structural change isn't an option.

Resources Mentioned:

• Peter's LinkedIn Learning Course on Value Stream Management

About Definitely Maybe Agile: Join Peter Maddison (XodiacInc) and Dave Sharrock (IncrementOne) as they discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Real conversations about digital transformation, agile, and DevOps challenges, no sugar-coating, just practical insights.

🎧 Subscribe for weekly episodes on making agile work in the real world

Got a question or topic you'd like us to cover? Reach out to us!

Key Topics:

• Embedding UX research into agile sprints, balancing short-term feedback loops with long-term strategic insights
• The "electric bicycle" analogy: How AI gives teams superpowers but can also accelerate you in the wrong direction
• Why Nick believes he'll never use Figma again, shifting from design tools to code-native prototyping
• Building functional prototypes using company design systems and generative AI tools
• The evolution of team size: From 6-8 person cross-functional teams to powerful 2-3 person teams leveraging AI
• The architect's mindset: Understanding the technical foundation before designing the interface

Three Key Takeaways:

1. What an incredible opportunity we have; it feels like the year 2000 again, with the excitement and disruption ahead
2. Small teams (2-3 people) with diverse perspectives can now move incredibly fast using modern tools
3.  Speed is powerful, but you still need feedback loops to ensure you're building the right thing and not racing in the wrong direction

Connect with us: Website: https://definitelymaybeagile.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/definitely-maybe-agile-podcast Email: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

Dave and Peter challenge the linear, step-by-step approach to understanding customer experience. From showers on Emirates flights to adaptive payment systems, they explore why our traditional mapping tools might be keeping us from seeing breakthrough opportunities.

What We Cover:

• Why traditional journey maps focus on the "critical path" and miss everything else
• The shift from cohorts and personas to individualized experiences
• The privacy paradox of hyper-personalization
• How decreasing costs make adaptive systems possible

Key Takeaways: 

✅ Traditional customer journey mapping optimizes a narrow, linear experience when customers want many different paths 

✅ Privacy and ethics matter more as experiences become hyper-personalized 

✅ What was too costly before is now feasible, changing the game for customer experience

Perfect for product managers, CX professionals, and digital transformation leaders.

Connect: definitelymaybeagile.com | feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

This week´s Takeaways

1. AI as Capacity Booster, Not Team Replacer: AI agents excel at handling the "hygiene" work that teams often skip: documentation, test automation, release notes. Rather than shrinking teams, this gives existing teams ephemeral capacity to tackle work that improves long-term system quality and maintainability.
2. Context Determines Team Size: One-person teams work brilliantly for startups and greenfield projects where you can build from scratch. But complex legacy systems in large organizations still need the diverse knowledge and experience that comes with larger teams to navigate technical debt and organizational complexity.
3. Solve Real Business Problems First: The biggest AI failures happen when teams focus on cool technology instead of actual business needs. Before experimenting with smaller teams or AI agents, identify genuine business problems that need solving; that's where you'll see real returns and organizational support.

Radhika shares hard-learned lessons from her 25-year career across diverse industries and five acquisitions, introducing the concept of "product diseases" like hero syndrome, pivotitis, and obsessive sales disorder that plague modern product teams. She challenges conventional wisdom around OKRs and goal-setting, explaining why they often create an illusion of performance while masking real problems.

The conversation explores why goals, targets, and OKRs backfire and what actually works instead. Radhika introduces her tried-and-tested alternative: a framework for puzzle-setting and puzzle-solving called OHLs (Objectives, Hypotheses, and Learnings). This approach helps companies develop a mindset that equips teams to experiment, learn, and adapt in a disciplined way, ultimately delivering far better results than traditional goal-setting methods.

The discussion dives deep into crafting detailed, hypothesis-driven vision statements that actually help teams make decisions, rather than fluffy corporate speak that sounds inspiring but provides no guidance. Radhika explains how to balance vision debt against short-term survival needs using her three-question puzzle-solving framework.

Key Takeaways:

• The importance of writing good hypotheses and understanding customer pain points deeply before defining experiments and measurements
• Organizations need to get much closer to their target customers to truly understand their behaviors and pain points, enabling better vision statements and hypotheses that resonate
• Effective vision statements must enable decision-making; if you can't make yes/no decisions based on your vision, and understand the trade-offs between short-term survival and long-term vision, it's not valuable enough

Free Resource: Download the OHLs template and toolkit: https://www.radicalproduct.com/toolkit/#OHLToolkit

They dig into why the processes you can easily map might not be the ones where AI agents add the most value. From recruitment pipelines that need human intuition to DevOps workflows that demand zero variation, not every process is created equal when it comes to AI intervention.

This week's takeaways:

• Categorize your processes first. Look at your processes and start sorting them. Some need to eliminate variation (like DevOps deployment pipelines), while others benefit from exploring the edges and finding creative solutions.
• Not all processes are equal when it comes to AI. There are many ways AI can help improve processes, but you need to think about whether you want to reduce variability or increase intelligent flexibility in each specific case.
• Train AI to know when to hand off. What you want AI to do is recognize when it can't handle something and pass it to the right system - whether that's a math library for calculations or a human for complex decisions.
• Understand the difference between consistency and exploration. DevOps spent years eliminating variation to create stable, repeatable deployments. Other processes might actually want that variation because it gives you something unusual and valuable.

If you're wrestling with where to apply AI in your organization without breaking what already works, this episode offers a practical framework for thinking through the trade-offs.

Resource:

• Ethan Mollick's "The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can": https://substack.com/home/post/p-169199293

Questions or thoughts? Reach us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

His most surprising discovery? Trust has become the single most predictive emotion across all industries. Companies with high trust create lasting loyalty, while low-trust organizations remain vulnerable no matter how well they're currently performing.

Warren shares a compelling healthcare case where well-intentioned technology actually destroyed employee experience by preventing human connections, plus insights on why leadership becomes more critical during agile transformations.

Key Takeaways:

• Trust beats everything: Trust is now the most predictive emotion across industries. High-trust cultures create sustainable advantage while low-trust organizations stay vulnerable to competitors
• Leaders must change too: In agile transformations, leadership becomes more important, not less. Leaders need to model vulnerability and change alongside their teams
• Stories reveal hidden patterns: Traditional data tells you "what" happened but stories tell you "why" it happened, uncovering emotional drivers surveys completely miss

Drawing from George Box's famous insight that "all models are wrong, but some are useful," they discuss how tools evolve but don't necessarily become obsolete. With AI making prototyping faster and cheaper than ever, the conversation explores what's changed about experimentation and what hasn't.

The hosts dig into common misapplications of Lean Startup principles, from "MVPs" that take months to build to organizations that skip the crucial feedback loops. They also explore when incremental learning isn't enough and you need those bigger strategic pivots.

Plus, they make the case for Wardley mapping as an underutilized tool for spotting step-change opportunities that incremental approaches might miss.

Key Takeaways:

• Lean thinking remains relevant: Lean Startup is still a valuable operational tool for continuous learning and incremental improvement, but it works best when properly implemented with complete feedback loops
• You need multiple models: Organizations need both incremental change capabilities (like Lean Startup) and strategic step-change tools (like Wardley mapping) to navigate complexity effectively
• AI commoditizes development, not strategy: While AI tools make prototyping easier and faster, they don't replace the need for good product thinking, user experience design, or asking the right strategic questions

Whether you're questioning your current approach to product development or looking for ways to balance tactical execution with strategic vision, this episode offers a pragmatic perspective on using the right tools for the right challenges.

They unpack the idea that when agile is done right, it actually helps reduce risk, not amplify it. You’ll hear stories and analogies (yep, including a messy kitchen and airplane cockpits) that bring this idea to life. Along the way, they highlight why teams that obsess over "faster delivery" often end up with systems that are, well, kind of fragile.

Whether you're navigating compliance hurdles, trying to foster psychological safety, or just figuring out how to move fast without chaos, this conversation brings a grounded, practical take on how agile and risk can work together, not against each other.

This week’s takeaways:

• Learning continuously is more powerful than just moving quickly
• Teams should feel safe to say “something doesn’t feel right”
• Focus on what’s working, not just what’s broken

Peter breaks down how organizations can manage 80% of their cyber risk through smart planning and leveraging existing tools, without requiring massive budgets or dedicated security teams. We explore how cybersecurity extends beyond technology into HR practices, organizational culture, and the power of community collaboration.

Three Key Takeaways:

1. Have a Plan: Create and regularly test an incident response plan that outlines what to do when things go wrong, who to call, and how to communicate with stakeholders.
2. Make It Collaborative: Use tabletop exercises and casual team conversations about "what if" scenarios to build risk awareness while fostering team building.
3. Build Community: Connect with industry peers to create a network of contacts you can call during a crisis and share resources with non-competing organizations.

Key takeaways:

• Shorter cycles are essential
• There are no safe bets anymore
• Alignment matters more than technology

For more insights, visit definitelymaybeagile.com, subscribe, and follow us on social media. Questions or feedback? Reach out at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

Derek brings a practical perspective on implementing AI in enterprise environments, focusing on his company's voice-powered AI assistant "Pocket Mentor" that helps organizations capture tribal knowledge and streamline employee onboarding. The conversation explores the challenges of extracting expertise from subject matter experts, the importance of having clear business outcomes when adopting AI, and advice for students navigating career choices in an AI-driven world.

Key Takeaways:

• Focus on Business Outcomes Over Buzzwords - Don't implement AI just to check a box or follow trends. Instead, identify specific business problems (like inefficient onboarding or knowledge retention) and then explore how AI can provide practical solutions to those challenges.
• AI Excels at Knowledge Augmentation and Accessibility - AI's greatest strength lies in making organizational knowledge instantly accessible 24/7, without judgment, and at a consistent quality level. This is particularly valuable for onboarding new employees and capturing tribal knowledge from subject matter experts before it walks out the door.
• Take Time to Learn and Evaluate Before Jumping In - The AI wave mirrors the early internet adoption curve and will continue evolving over the next 10-15 years. Organizations and individuals have time to thoughtfully evaluate AI solutions rather than rushing to adopt the first available option, emphasizing the importance of learning practical applications before implementation.

In this episode,  Dave and Peter explore with Leandro how successful teams are built through strategic cultural assessment rather than simple skill matching. The conversation reveals the difference between "cultural fit" and "cultural add," and how one retail company reduced their 80% turnover rate by half, saving millions through targeted assessment questions.

Leandro breaks down why remote team success hinges on comprehensive onboarding (which drives 80% better retention) and intentional connection building beyond work tasks. Without deliberate efforts like virtual team activities and structured check-ins, remote work becomes "just a slogan" rather than a successful strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• Culture encompasses both fit and add - assess how candidates navigate existing dynamics while bringing fresh perspectives
• Remote work requires intentional investment - comprehensive onboarding and dedicated connection-building are non-negotiable
• Treat talent acquisition strategically - connect hiring with development plans and performance expectations for real business impact

This episode explores balancing directive consulting with coaching. Modern transformations benefit from proven frameworks combined with coaching conversations that help leaders navigate challenges personally. We also examine measuring system change rather than just activity, understanding that progress is non-linear and involves experimentation cycles.

Key Takeaways

• Close the Vision-Reality Gap - Executives need concrete details about organizational changes, not just strategic concepts
• Blend Consulting with Coaching - Combine proven frameworks with personal coaching conversations
• Measure System Change - Focus on meaningful indicators rather than activity metrics

This week´s takeaways:

• Master the "What if I wasn't here?" question - The most powerful way for product managers to stand out is by clearly articulating what wouldn't have happened without their involvement, moving beyond just keeping engineers busy
• Prioritize product-market fit above all else - If you don't have at least 40% of customers who would "crawl to you" if you took the product away, that should be your only focus until achieved
• Balance execution with strategic thinking - Use the three horizons framework and deliberately make important long-term work urgent by creating commitments and deadlines, while leveraging AI to handle routine tasks faster

This week´s takeaways:

• Systems Over Silos: Toyota's integrated management system creates both vertical alignment (connecting corporate objectives to frontline work) and horizontal alignment (ensuring cross-functional collaboration).
• Value-Creating Managers: Middle management layers should be redefined as value creators and people developers rather than eliminated or reduced.
• Improvement at the Gemba: Real progress happens by focusing improvements at the "gemba" (where work actually happens) with leadership's primary role being to remove burdens from frontline workers.

Mark explains the fundamental difference between most companies' approach to strategy and Toyota's integrated management system. Unlike conventional top-down cascading goals, Hoshin Kanri creates alignment throughout the organization. The discussion explores practical aspects of strategy execution: separating strategic initiatives from daily management, structuring cross-departmental collaboration, and developing people at all levels. Whether you're struggling with siloed departments, disconnected leadership, or strategies that never fully materialize, this episode offers a blueprint for creating systems that align vision with execution while developing organizational capability.

Resources: 

• The Machine That Changed the World - by James P. Womack- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93903.The_Machine_That_Changed_the_World_ 
• Managing Our Purpose - by Mark Reich- https://www.lean.org/store/book/managing-on-purpose/ 
• Our Least Important Asset - by Peter Capelli- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75492283-our-least-important-asset?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=IGIsI50s8q&rank=1

Steven's journey from IBM software engineer to Hollywood executive (where he helped manage franchises like Die Hard and Wolverine at studios including DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox) provides a refreshing perspective on team productivity and creative collaboration. He explains how the film industry has long mastered the transitions between remote, hybrid, and in-person work—knowledge that proved invaluable when the pandemic forced tech teams into distributed environments.

 The conversation explores the neuroscience of creativity, practical leadership approaches to foster flow states, and how Steven's experiences led him to create a platform specifically designed to help remote workers overcome procrastination while maintaining wellbeing. This is one not to miss! 

 Key Takeaways: 

• Leaders can create environments where flow happens - Establishing boundaries like protected focus time (e.g., 9 AM to noon) allows team members to accomplish meaningful work before daily meetings begin.
• The "two-problem" approach to creativity - Having more than one challenge to work on simultaneously can unlock creative solutions, as your subconscious mind works on one problem while you actively engage with another.
• Remote work requires different "colors on your palette" - Different work modes (remote, hybrid, in-office) excel at different tasks, with in-person collaboration being particularly valuable for creative ideation and whiteboarding sessions.

Books Mentioned:

• "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - https://www.goodreads.com/es/book/show/66354.Flow
• "The Net and the Butterfly" by Olivia Fox - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30024684-the-net-and-the-butterfly
• "Atomic Habits" by James Clear - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121378-atomic-habits

In this episode of Definitely Maybe Agile, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock tackle "longstanding risks" – those temporary solutions that somehow become permanent fixtures in our systems. From memory-leaking services to utility companies skipping maintenance, they explore how small shortcuts create massive long-term costs.

This Week's Takeaways:

• Document your band-aids with clear reasoning and next steps
• Protect team capacity to enable thoughtful decision-making
• Focus on system resilience rather than trying to prevent every failure

Perfect for engineering leaders, DevOps teams, and anyone managing complex technical systems. Subscribe for more insights on scaling agile practices and building maintainable systems.

This week´s takeaways:

1. Revisit and reinforce your work definition process regularly, as changing roles and organizational shifts can erode even the most robust systems over time.
2. Use the "full kit" concept as part of your definition of ready, and be willing to say no to work that doesn't meet these criteria.
3. Work is ready to start when it's the team's top priority, has a clearly defined problem to solve, and the team can confidently estimate it within their typical delivery range.

BrightHive's solution is an "agentic data team in a box" – seven AI agents that work in unison to handle the entire data lifecycle from ingestion to governance to analytics. Unlike typical AI solutions, these agents operate at the metadata layer to ensure quality, compliance, and meaningful insights without replacing human expertise.

The conversation covers compelling use cases across industries – from helping resource-constrained organizations extend their analytical capacity to unifying fragmented data landscapes resulting from mergers and acquisitions. Perhaps most striking is Suzanne's vision for measuring AI's impact through what she calls the "delight KPI" – are employees finding their work more fulfilling when augmented by these tools?

Key Takeaways:

• Data fragmentation persists - Organizations struggle with siloed data across systems, especially after mergers, blocking comprehensive analysis.
• AI augments human intelligence - "A doctor with AI will displace a doctor without AI" - the goal is removing grunt work so humans tackle higher-value analysis.
• Measure the "delight KPI" - Track how AI improves job satisfaction by enabling more data-informed work without technical bottlenecks.
• Cultural shift needs technical solutions AND organizational buy-in to overcome skepticism about AI in the workplace.

This week´s takeaways:

• Creating capacity through new technologies doesn't mean downsizing teams—it means enabling organizations to address previously neglected but valuable work while maintaining knowledge pipelines.
• Team autonomy is crucial for effective change management—when teams have both direction and freedom to make decisions about their workspace, they can respond more effectively to urgent needs in the system.
• Organizations must recognize and protect "slack time" as a valuable resource rather than inefficiency—this time for maintenance, innovation, and thinking is essential for sustainable systems.

The discussion contrasts the divergent career trajectories of these two roles. For Product Owners, a clearer path exists from managing individual products to becoming Chief Product Owners and potentially Line of Business managers, though challenges arise when the role lacks proper autonomy or is treated as a part-time responsibility. Meanwhile, Scrum Masters face a more ambiguous journey, with traditional progression into Agile coaching roles becoming increasingly limited in many organizations despite the valuable skills they develop.

Peter and Dave highlight the critical importance of demonstrating value and making contributions visible, particularly for Scrum Masters whose impact often remains behind the scenes. They also discuss how understanding financial aspects of the business becomes increasingly crucial as professionals advance in either career path.

Key Takeaways:

• Product Owners have clearer progression paths toward leadership positions, but organizations must properly position and empower the role from the beginning to enable this growth.
• Scrum Masters develop highly valuable skills in facilitating delivery and optimizing organizational flow, but need to actively demonstrate their impact to create career advancement opportunities.
• Both roles require increasingly strategic thinking about business value and financial outcomes to progress into higher leadership positions within organizations.

This week´s takeaways:

• Unlike KPIs which measure performance, OKRs measure progress and alignment to strategy. They should never be tied to individual performance metrics as this undermines their exploratory nature.
• Successful OKR implementation requires ongoing conversations, regular reviews, and a cultural shift. Many organizations underestimate the effort needed to maintain OKRs effectively.
• Effective OKRs should be limited in number (3-5 objectives with 3-5 key results each), represent stretch goals beyond business-as-usual, and serve as a prioritization mechanism for the organization.

Drawing from their battle-tested experience working with financial and technology organizations, Peter and David crack open the uncomfortable truth: many companies still treat risk management as a checkbox exercise rather than a competitive advantage. They reveal how the explosion of data analytics capabilities has rendered old "rule of thumb" approaches obsolete while simultaneously creating entirely new risk landscapes that most organizations are woefully unprepared to navigate.

This week's takeaways :

1. Risk management begins with identifying vulnerabilities, understanding potential impacts, and making informed decisions about how to handle them—whether through acceptance, avoidance, transfer, or reduction.
2. Effective risk management isn't just about frameworks and committees—it requires a cultural environment of psychological safety where risks can be openly discussed without fear.
3. The most effective approaches position oversight functions like architecture as service providers rather than gatekeepers, helping teams move forward safely rather than simply blocking progress.

Subscribe to "Definitely Maybe Agile" to transform how your organization approaches risk, digital transformation, and DevOps at scale.

The conversation explores the critical balance between product market fit and product solution fit, with David emphasizing why focusing on customer problems rather than product features leads to greater success. Whether you're a startup founder, product manager, or development team leader, this episode with the host of the Scaling Smarter Podcast provides actionable insights for creating products that truly solve customer problems and generate sustainable revenue.

This week´s takeaways:

• The most valuable customer conversations happen when you ask about their problems, not your product features.
• Successful product management requires understanding both the perceived impact of a problem and its actual cost to customers.
• Successful founders and product managers are those who love understanding customer problems and spend their time learning about customer challenges.

The conversation explores the Press Release and Frequently Asked Questions (PR FAQ) framework developed at Amazon around 2004. This approach helps teams clarify vision and strategy before jumping into execution, addressing a common problem in software projects. Unlike PowerPoint presentations that can create an "illusion of clarity," the PR FAQ document promotes alignment and ownership through collaborative creation.

This week´s takeaways:

• Why most PR FAQs actually lead to "no" decisions (which is valuable)
• How the framework balances strategic thinking with practical considerations
• The importance of involving multiple stakeholders (sometimes 20+ people)
• How PR FAQs can be used at different product lifecycle stages

The hosts draw parallels to lean startup methodology, while Marcelo explains why PR FAQ encourages "thinking before shooting" rather than the "build first, learn later" approach. The discussion highlights how clear, collaborative documentation can prevent misalignment and create shared ownership of initiatives.

You can check out Marcelo's website and book here: The PRFAQ Framework

From setting clear entry criteria to measuring throughput and pivoting when needed, they break down how teams can structure their workflows to prioritize value-driven outcomes. Whether you're refining your backlog, managing stakeholder expectations, or optimizing delivery processes, this episode provides practical insights to help you navigate uncertainty while keeping momentum.

This week´s takeaways: 

• Clear intake process – Define criteria to assess idea readiness before execution.
• Product vs. project mindset – Embrace uncertainty and pivot as needed.
• Measure progress – Use checkpoints and throughput tracking to prioritize work.

Tune in to learn how to balance discipline with flexibility and ensure your work moves forward with intention!

This week´s takeaways: 

• The fundamental problems Agile addresses remain constant, even as attitudes toward the methodology evolve.
• Organizations often struggle with Agile implementation due to legacy architecture, leadership buy-in, and organizational context.
• Like Lean before it, Agile is transitioning from a hyped methodology to becoming part of a broader toolkit.

Ready for more insights?  Follow Definitely Maybe Agile on your favorite podcast platform and join Peter and David as they tackle the complexities of digital transformation at scale. New episodes drop regularly!

This week´s takeaways:

• Shared terminology drives better communication and decision-making across teams and departments.
• Principles empower teams more effectively than rigid processes and controls.
• Leading with principles while maintaining essential process documentation creates the right organizational balance.

• Clear, sequenced priorities shared across teams - focus on completing initiatives before starting new ones
• Detailed planning for immediate work (1-2 months), with less detail for future months
• Active dependency management to identify and address bottlenecks early

This week's takeaways:

• Organizations succeed by flexibly switching between agile and traditional project management based on context
• Success comes from delivering tangible business value alongside traditional project execution
• Match your methodology to the problem: ordered problems suit traditional approaches, while complex problems need agile methods

• Separate tactical (near-term) and strategic backlogs to reduce psychological pressure and maintain focus - avoid creating extensive long-term backlogs that will likely become irrelevant.
• Stakeholder prioritization must be balanced with technical constraints and team capabilities - product owners should communicate changes in delivery order transparently to maintain trust.
• Regular backlog refinement should include archiving rejected items instead of deleting them, helping teams avoid repeatedly addressing the same requests while keeping the active backlog manageable.

Ready to scale your agile practices? Tune in to more episodes on your favorite platform.

This week´s takeaways: 

•  Executive decision-making challenges often stem from two distinct factors: emotional intelligence issues (dealing with unprepared stakeholders) and critical thinking problems (legitimate exploration of complex issues). 
•  The traditional "highest paid person's opinion" (HiPPO) approach to decision-making is becoming increasingly dangerous in today's rapidly changing business environment, where the speed of market changes demands faster and more distributed decision-making processes. 
•  Modern leadership requires a fundamental shift from centralized control to distributed authority, with leaders focusing on creating frameworks that enable lower-level decision-making while maintaining visibility of outcomes. 

🎧 Want to Transform Your Leadership Approach? Subscribe to Definitely Maybe Agile on your favorite podcast platform

• TCO fundamentals remain unchanged, but the environment for calculating and applying TCO has become more complex.
• Organizations must distinguish between strategic proprietary development and commoditized solutions, using tools like Wardley mapping to identify where to invest versus reduce costs.
• Understanding and defining system boundaries is crucial for accurate TCO calculation - using approaches like value chain mapping, value stream mapping, or domain-driven design helps identify hidden costs and dependencies.

Subscribe to Definitely Maybe Agile on your favourite platform and join Peter and David as they unpack the challenges of digital transformation at scale.

• How regulatory compliance is reshaping data management practices
• The critical balance between quantitative and qualitative data in decision-making
• The impact of AI and LLMs on data analysis and sentiment tracking

Whether you're a technology leader, data professional, or business executive, this episode provides insights into navigating the complex intersection of data governance, team structure, and business value. Learn why traditional approaches to data management may be insufficient for today's challenges and what successful organizations are doing differently.

• SDLC optimization  - A key value creation area that continues to evolve through new approaches and technologies.
• AI applications extend beyond developer tools - Moving past coding assistance to improve productivity across multiple roles and touchpoints.
• AI as an organizational assistant - Understanding company knowledge, refining ideas, and improving prioritization and decision-making processes.

Want to join the conversation about AI in SDLC and digital transformation at scale? Share your thoughts and feedback at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast to stay updated on future discussions about agile and DevOps practices.

• Lack of leadership buy-in and support can doom an agile transformation effort, as the change agents lack the authority and credibility to drive the necessary changes.
• Fixing the wrong problem or focusing on ineffective solutions like training can waste time and resources, highlighting the importance of accurately diagnosing the root causes.
• Challenges with strong-willed leaders, constantly shifting priorities, and non-dedicated teams all require skilled navigation and a focus on addressing the underlying leadership and organizational issues.

By the end of this discussion, you'll understand why identifying the right problem is crucial for meaningful transformation and how organizations can avoid these common traps to achieve genuine progress.

•  Effective work relationships require trust flowing both ways between leadership and teams.
• Breaking down work into smaller, measurable pieces isn't about micromanagement – it's about creating clarity, enabling better learning, and building confidence in progress.
• Leaders need to be mindful of how they request updates and information.

 Listen in for actionable ideas and engaging perspectives that will help you build stronger, more accountable teams.

• Continuous Improvement Needs Constant Nurturing
• Small Steps Lead to Big Changes
• Make Progress Visible and Achievable

 Want more practical insights on scaling agile and DevOps practices? Join Peter and Dave as they unpack the complexities of modern software delivery and organizational transformation. Subscribe to Definitely Maybe Agile wherever you get your podcasts, and share your thoughts at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

• Provide comprehensive organizational context to new hires
• Implement apprenticeship-style, hands-on learning
• Create easily digestible, on-demand learning content
• Develop robust DevOps practices for early engagement
• Balance formal training with informal learning opportunities
• Regularly validate learning progress and understanding
• Tailor onboarding approaches to different roles and experience levels

Don't miss this episode if you're looking to enhance your organization's onboarding processes and create a more agile and efficient workplace environment.

• Organizations should focus on the benefits and mindset of agile rather than getting caught up in terminology or strict processes.
• Continued efforts to drive cultural shifts are important, even as the initial momentum for change may wane in some environments.
• Instead of fixating on agile terminology or frameworks, organizations should concentrate on fostering collaboration, cross-functional teamwork, and achieving tangible business outcomes to deliver better value sooner safer happier.

Tune in for actionable strategies to foster perseverance and continuous improvement. Don't miss out—subscribe and share with your friends to keep the insights flowing!

• Data-driven decision-making is valuable, but you need the right data. Companies need to balance quantitative data with qualitative insights and intuition.
• Optimizing for existing customers isn't enough for growth. Businesses must also focus on attracting new customers and exploring adjacent markets.
• Organizational culture plays a critical role in transformation efforts. Companies need to foster an environment where employees feel empowered to speak up and challenge prevailing narratives.
• Not everything that matters can be easily measured. Organizations should find ways to understand and manage important factors, even if they are difficult to quantify, rather than ignoring them in favor of easily measurable metrics.

Resources_ 
Nike’s $25B blunder shows us the limits of “data-driven-  https://uxdesign.cc/nikes-25b-blunder-shows-us-the-limits-of-data-driven-ad30b6e3d938

• Organizations must understand what they need to comply with and set up systems and practices that make evidence easily obtainable without disrupting workflow.
• Implement automation in the delivery system to capture and expose evidence of compliance, making it easier to demonstrate adherence to regulations without slowing down agile processes.
• Shift the audit focus from document checking and stage gates to validating system behavior. This approach can make audits more meaningful and engage development teams in solving compliance challenges creatively.

• Quality is cultural, not mechanical. Sustainable improvement comes from fostering a culture of quality rather than simply implementing mechanical processes.
• Building quality in is more effective than inspecting for quality at the end. Organizations that integrate quality throughout their development process tend to perform better than those relying on final quality checks.
• Cultural change is slow to build but quick to lose. While it takes time and effort to cultivate a quality-focused culture, it can be rapidly undermined by leadership changes, mergers, or short-term thinking.

Don’t miss out on this deep dive into aligning leadership and processes to create an environment where quality and innovation can truly thrive.

• Developer experience is becoming a crucial focus for organizations, driven by factors such as the adoption of AI tools like GitHub Copilot and the need to improve productivity and retention.
• Measuring developer experience requires a multifaceted approach, including telemetry, flow metrics, impact metrics, and qualitative data gathered through surveys and direct conversations with employees.
• Long-term considerations, such as employee retention and engagement, are essential aspects of developer experience that require careful attention and cannot be addressed solely through short-term productivity metrics.

Tune in, and rethink how you measure and optimize developer experience for sustained innovation and long-term organizational growth.

This week´s takeaways: 

• Understanding your customer is crucial for effective communication, both externally and within organizations.
• There isn't a single perfect message; successful communication often requires multiple tailored approaches.
• Focus on solving one specific problem for your customer rather than trying to address everything at once.

Stay tuned for more episodes that promise continued insights into effective agile and DevOps strategies. Your feedback and subscription are pivotal to our journey, so join us and become part of our growing community.

• Leaders must shift from managing work to leading people, focusing on coaching and building trust rather than micromanaging tasks, especially in remote and hybrid environments.
• Effective leadership, particularly in remote settings, requires increased emphasis on empathy, regular check-ins, and building relationships with team members beyond work-related discussions.
• Companies need to invest more in leadership training and development, recognizing that leadership is a skill set that requires ongoing support and education, not just a title or promotion.

Don't miss this episode! Tune in now to discover how leaders can adapt and thrive in the modern work environment. Listen to it today!

• The true value lies in developing team discipline to consistently meet the agreed-upon criteria, not just in creating the list itself.
• Should be viewed as a "tax on delivery" - a necessary investment in quality that may slightly reduce immediate output but prevents future rework and technical debt.
• The implementation requires buy-in from the entire team, including product owners, and should be kept to a manageable 5-10 items to ensure consistent adherence.

Whether you're a seasoned agile practitioner or new to the concept, this episode offers valuable lessons on the balance between quality and commitment, ensuring your team's work stands the test of time.

• Recognize when a discussion is becoming unproductive due to emotional responses, and be willing to step back, listen, and allow time for tensions to dissipate before proceeding.
• Tailor your presentation of data and information to your audience, keeping it simple and clear.
• Be aware of hidden incentives or underlying factors that may be influencing someone's response to a proposed change. Listen actively to understand their perspective and concerns beyond the surface-level reaction.

Don't miss this episode brimming with practical advice and actionable strategies for navigating the intricate landscape of organizational decision-making.

• Organizational coaches provide valuable objectivity by observing the system from the outside, offering insights that those within the system might miss.
• While the term "agile coach" may evolve, the need for nurturing support to help organizations improve and adapt remains crucial in today's business landscape.
• There are strong parallels between coaching in high-performing sports teams and successful businesses, with coached organizations generally outperforming those without coaching support.

Don’t miss this conversation about the enduring necessity and transformative potential of Agile coaching

• Recognizing and working with your natural energy patterns throughout the day can significantly impact productivity. Tackle complex tasks when you're most alert, and incorporate breaks to maintain energy levels.
• Organize tasks based on priority and context (e.g., grouping similar activities together). This approach can help create a more efficient workflow and reduce the mental burden of constantly switching between different types of tasks.
• Be kind to yourself when facing productivity challenges. Techniques like the Pomodoro method, breaking large tasks into smaller steps, and planning your week in advance can help overcome procrastination and increase overall productivity.

Tune in to elevate your productivity game and achieve a harmonious work-life integration.

• Before embarking on any transformation, it's crucial to understand where your organization currently stands.
• Successful transformations require buy-in and participation from all parts of the organization.
• Rather than attempting large-scale changes simultaneously, focus on implementing transformations in small, manageable increments.

Join us as we navigate the complexities of organizational transformation with practical advice on achieving smooth, well-communicated change. 

• Avoid individual assignments; encourage team members to pull tasks collaboratively.
• Individual assignments may be necessary for specialized skills or simple tasks, but use sparingly.
• Frequent individual assignments can reduce team autonomy, engagement, and skill development.

We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

• Leadership must prioritize and role model continuous learning through expectations and behaviors
• Create capacity by prioritizing work, saying no to non-essentials, and reducing overload
• Align organizational design (teams, feedback loops, tech) and strategy to enable learning

We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic please contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

• Assess the organization's readiness and openness to change before adopting Scrum, especially if past attempts have failed or if it is seen as a quick fix.
• Scrum thrives in collaborative environments; if the work is highly individualistic, Scrum may not be suitable.
• A cautious approach is required in complex and high-risk environments, potentially adapting Scrum or considering other frameworks.

Tune in to gain a nuanced understanding of how to navigate agile frameworks in complex environments and make informed decisions for your teams.

• Avoid defaulting to a watered-down "hybrid" methodology that dilutes best practices.
• Deeply analyze problems to determine the optimal approach - don't blindly apply one-size-fits-all.
• Promote peer-to-peer cooperation and mutual understanding across boundaries between different practices rather than hierarchical control.
• Strive for an integrated enterprise where distinct methodologies complement each other fluidly.

We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic please contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

This week´s takeaways: 

• Organizational systems are often designed to produce repetitive, constrained behavior, making it difficult for individuals to break out of engrained patterns, even when change is needed.
• True accountability requires not just assigning responsibility, but providing the authority, support and incentives for people to exercise that accountability.
• Leaders must be intentional about using inclusive language that creates psychological safety and invites open dialogue, rather than language that shuts down discourse.

Resources:

• The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davis- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211161687-the-unaccountability-machine
• Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say -- and What You Don't by David Marquet - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42774083-leadership-is-language?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_39

 We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic please contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

• Blindly following capital-A "Agile" transformations can lead to throwing out valuable organizational change management wisdom accumulated over decades.
• Organizations are complex systems, and sustainable change requires understanding human behaviors and making changes at a rate the organizational "immune system" can absorb rather than big disruptive shifts.
• Clear strategic direction combined with empowering teams for continuous bottom-up improvement is critical. Frequent communication and recognizing people as adaptive beings, not just mechanical components, is crucial for effective change.

 We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic related to organizational change management and creating truly adaptive systems, please get in touch with us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

This week´s takeaways:

• Clearly outline the level of authority and accountability the PO will have over the product's success, profitability, and decision-making. 
• Look for candidates with relevant domain experience, an understanding of the business models, and the capability to analyze the product's impact on the organization's ecosystem, including costs, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
• During the interview process, pay attention to candidates who naturally share stories and narratives about their experiences, challenges they overcame, and lessons learned. These stories often provide insights into their problem-solving abilities and deep understanding of product ownership.

We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic related to nurturing exceptional product ownership, feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. 

Key takeaways:

• Threat modeling is a security practice that involves identifying and mitigating potential threats to an organization's assets.
• Threat models should be created and maintained early in the SDLC, but don't need to be updated for every minor change.
• A mechanism for ongoing communication between developers and security professionals is essential for effective threat modeling.

Resources:

• Sooner Safer Happier   by Jonathan Smart - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50343488
• Larry Maccherone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyS1kmmlA5Y
• Martin Fowler blog  https://martinfowler.com/articles/scaling-architecture-conversationally.html

 Whether you're diving into DevSecOps or just looking to get a handle on threat modeling at scale, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in now as Dave and Peter discuss how to future-proof your organization! 

• Delegating authority and distributing power within an organization requires providing context, setting boundaries, and preparing employees for decision-making responsibilities.
• Leaders often avoid change due to a fear of losing authority, power, or performance. Coaching and empathy are essential to help leaders move from a state of caution to curiosity and eventually courage.
• Co-creating buy-in through collaboration and involving employees in decision-making processes leads to organic, natural buy-in and better solutions, as opposed to top-down directives.

Discount Information: Melissa provided a discount code for listeners interested in attending Agile 2024 in Dallas, where she will be the closing keynote speaker. The code "A24-podcast" will give you $100 off your registration-  https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2024/

We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

This week's takeaways:

• Bottom-up estimation, where every task is estimated and summed up, is highly inefficient and inaccurate, especially for long-term projects or when requirements are likely to change.
• Top-down estimation, which involves breaking down work into relatable chunks and understanding the journey, is more effective and allows for adaptability as the project progresses.
• Estimation should be an ongoing conversation between teams, stakeholders, and decision-makers, focusing on problem-solving, progress tracking, and continuous feedback rather than rigid timelines.

Tune in for a riveting discussion that challenges traditional notches around estimation in agile software development. Subscribe to absorb invaluable insights on nurturing continuous conversations, embracing top-down estimation techniques, and fostering an environment primed for delivery excellence at scale.

• There is no single metric to measure developer productivity effectively. Look at correlations across multiple qualitative and quantitative metrics.
• Focus on development productivity metrics for the overall system/team rather than individual developer productivity numbers.
• Make productivity metrics transparently available to developers, allowing them to self-regulate performance rather than being managed top-down.

Resource:  

Measuring Developer Productivity: Real-World Examples -
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity-bae

Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that reshapes how we perceive and enhance the developer experience in an ever-evolving industry. Subscribe to learn more insights around leadership, agile, and DevOps transformation at scale.

This week's takeaways:

• Organizational change management is essential, not optional, for successful digital transformation.
• Go beyond just communications - understand real end-user behaviors and intangible adoption factors.
• Build capabilities to collect user feedback/telemetry, learn from it, and adapt the change process accordingly.

Join the conversation and share your insights at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Your input could shape our next big topic. Subscribe today to learn more about organizational change. 

• "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."
• OKRs provide the roadmap, and KPIs gauge how well the core operations run.
• Identify the next incremental habit or process you can implement to move forward.

Join the conversation and share your insights at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com – your input could shape our next big topic. Subscribe today and learn more about agile teams.

• Top agile teams measure their performance, enabling transparency and continuous improvement.
• Focus on continuous learning and quality.
• Cultivate a collaborative, blame-free culture focused on the work while maintaining a balanced, fun, and supportive team environment.

Join the conversation and share your insights at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com – your input could shape our next big topic. Subscribe today and learn more about agile teams

This week's takeaways:

• Keep an eye on Steve Denning's work.
• Focus on financial performance.
• Avoid using the term "agile" and focus on the outcome you are trying to achieve.

Resources:
Why The World’s Most Valuable Firms Are So Agile- https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2024/02/26/why-the-worlds-most-valuable-firms-are-so-agile/?sh=1094bb1d794c

Have your own take on whether an agile mindset truly powers the world's most valuable firms? Let us know at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.  Subscribe today to gain a fresher outlook on embracing organizational agility without the buzzwords.

• Leaders must cultivate self-awareness
• Encourage the blending of diverse perspectives
• Practice Patience and Self-Repair

Resources:
How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity- https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-274-how-capable-leaders-navigate?utm_source=activity_item

Join the conversation and share your insights at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com – your input could shape our next big topic. Subscribe today and equip yourself to navigate the beautiful mess of leadership!

• Prepare like a pro and "socialize" your ideas beforehand.
• Keep it short, clear, and data-driven.
• Adapt your language to the audience.

Join the conversation and share your insights with us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com – your input could shape our next big topic. Tune in, and let's take this journey towards exceptional executive communication together.

• Dedicated teams are no longer a guaranteed starting point.
• Build trust, use clear language, and focus on small.
• Prioritize creating value over disruptive reorganizations

Join us as we explore how to embrace agile principles and achieve success, even in the face of resistance. We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

• Bridging the perspective gap
• Behavioral Influences on Organizational Dynamics
• Beware of Resistance and Long-Term Challenges
• Non-believers in change or the system

 Subscribe and tune in for an enlightening journey that extends beyond theories, equipping you with the tools necessary to steer your organization through the transformative tides of digital, agile, and DevOps methodologies. If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

For those striving to guide intuition-driven leaders towards a more data-informed approach, our dialogue offers inventive tactics for leveraging trusted allies and fostering a climate of persistent, creative persuasion. 

This week's takeaways:

• Data-driven vs. number-driven decision making: Data alone isn't enough. Context and understanding of statistical deviations are crucial for sound judgments.
• Overcoming resistance to data-driven decisions: Inflexible leaders pose a challenge. Directly challenging their intuition might be ineffective. 
• Empowering teams and managing technical debt: Create short feedback cycles to enable rapid decision-making and results demonstration.

Resources:

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions - https://a.co/d/dzojO5k

Jeff Bezos- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub585Pn4yro

Tune in to transform how you harness data for smart, insightful leadership decisions. We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

• System Over Agile: Burnout in developers isn't caused by Agile itself but by systemic issues within the organization.
• Curiosity Beats Assumptions: Prioritize curiosity over jumping to conclusions, as it leads to a deeper understanding of complex problems.
• Experience Matters: Consider both developer productivity and experience, as focusing solely on productivity metrics may miss important qualitative aspects of developer well-being.

Join us on a thought-provoking journey as we dissect the nuanced relationship between leadership, incentives, and workplace behaviors. Far from a one-sided debate, we consider how effective leadership and the right organizational incentives can create an environment that not only encourages productivity but also ensures the sustainability of its workforce. Peter and David don't just skim the surface; they dig deep into the complexities that drive developer burnout and explore the intricate dance of factors that can make or break the health of a tech team. Tune in and gain insight into crafting a more supportive and resilient work culture. 

 We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

This week's takeaways:

• Technical Adoption Curve: Expect a decline in satisfaction as Agile reaches a broader audience, particularly the late majority, causing discomfort and peaking expectations.
• Organizational Size Matters: Satisfaction correlates with organizational size. Agile is a significant improvement in smaller organizations, but in larger ones, it becomes one tool among many, increasing the risk of misapplication.
• Not All or Nothing: Agile is not an all-or-nothing solution. In larger organizations, it coexists with different methodologies, challenging the idea of a universal fix and emphasizing the need for tailored solutions based on context.

Resources:
Agile development is fading in popularity at large enterprises - and developer burnout is a key factor- https://www.itpro.com/software/agile-development-is-fading-in-popularity-at-large-enterprises-and-developer-burnout-is-a-key-factor

Join us for an episode that will broaden your understanding of how large enterprises can adapt and embrace a more efficient and fulfilling agile culture. We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.

• Context-Driven Application of Frameworks
• Recognition of Overlapping Intersections
• Holistic Thinking for Organizational Change

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

• Connecting Strategy to Execution.
• Shift in Language and Terminology.
• People-Centric Focus.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

• Invest in Skill Development: Explore the untapped potential in skill development.
• Embrace Agility and Flexibility: Dive into the world of agility and flexibility demanded by the hybrid work model and shifting economic tides.
• Focus on Productivity and Delivery: Whether in-person or remote, the secret sauce lies in unwavering focus on productivity and delivery.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com

• Context-specific scaling: the need to tailor agile scaling efforts to the unique context and culture of each organization, acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work.
• Framework agnosticism:  the importance of not being overly reliant on a single agile framework. Instead, understanding and choosing from various frameworks and patterns to best fit your organization's specific needs is crucial.
• The 80-20 rule in scaling: identify the critical 20% of agile practices that are most relevant and impactful for your organization, while recognizing that 80% might be generally applicable.
• Organizational change as problem-solving:  scaling agile as an organizational change challenge, requiring a problem-solving mindset to identify specific issues and apply targeted agile practices effectively.

If you're interested in editing or providing feedback for their upcoming ebook, please contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for more insightful episodes.

• Emphasize the importance of due diligence in capacity planning, especially in transitional states where agile practices are not fully established.
• Acknowledge the interface between traditional project management and agile methodologies, recognizing that both have valuable contributions.
• Prioritize work based on a common understanding of organizational problems and goals.
• Communicate the idea that focusing on specific improvements doesn't mean discarding other initiatives but rather sequencing them for continuous enhancement.

For collaboration or feedback on our ebook, contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Be sure to subscribe, spread the word to a friend, and join our engaging conversations. Who knows? You might just be our next podcast guest as we continue to explore the rich tapestry of agile transformation

• Shift from Work-Centric to Customer-Centric View.
• Trust and empower agile teams to manage their capacities for better performance and adaptability.
• Identify critical skill sets and shared services beyond agile teams.
• Recognize potential bottlenecks in compliance, UX, or infrastructure for strategic capacity planning.

If you're interested in editing or providing feedback for their upcoming ebook, please contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for more insightful episodes.

• Design Thinking as a Habit: Make it a continual practice, not a one-time exercise.
• Transparency and Collaboration: Encourage everyone to challenge and share ideas, fostering a culture of innovation and problem-solving.
• Aligning Ideas with Objectives: Evaluate how feasible ideas contribute to strategic goals and adapt as necessary.
• Managing Conflicts and Respecting Ideas: Foster a comfortable environment for disagreement when important decisions need to be made.

If you're interested in editing or providing feedback for their upcoming ebook, please contact them at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for more insightful episodes.

• Leadership Matters: Open, experimental, and engaged leadership is essential for successful agile transformations.
• Collaboration: Combining bottom-up team initiatives with top-down support is crucial for lasting change.
• Business-Tech Alignment: Aligning technology with business objectives and adapting to market changes yields significant advantages in agile transformations.

Resources:
- Hudson Bay Start- https://derivadow.com/2007/11/08/hudson-bay-start-reducing-project-risk/

If you're interested in helping edit or provide feedback for their upcoming ebook, you can reach out to them at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for more insightful episodes. 

• Context Switching is a Hidden Productivity Killer.
• Make work visible and prioritize tasks.
• Recognize that it takes time to transition between different tasks and thinking modes.

Join us in this episode as we navigate through the challenges of context-switching and explore ways to build a more productive work environment.  Don't forget to subscribe and share your feedback! For additional resources and to join the conversation, contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Stay tuned for more exciting content!

• Effective Communication: Speak in a way your audience understands, especially when discussing complex topics like technology and business.
• Shift to a Strategic Partnership: Understand the challenges faced by the business and show how technology can be leveraged strategically.
• Collaborate in Both Directions: Success requires a two-way dialogue between IT and the business, with both sides contributing their insights and needs.

If you're ready to transform your organization's integration of IT and business, this episode is your guide. Join us on this enlightening journey, and don't forget to subscribe and give us your feedback! To learn more and be part of the conversation, contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Stay tuned for more exciting content! 

• Processes can range from fixed and unchanging to flexible and subject to continuous review.
• Find the right balance between creativity and risk when determining whether to keep, modify, or challenge processes.
• The nature of the problem space and context should influence how processes are approached and managed.

 By the end of the episode, you'll have the tools to tailor processes to your specific needs and the understanding necessary to implement large-scale changes. Don't forget to subscribe and share your feedback! For additional resources and to join the conversation, contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Stay tuned for more exciting content!

We delve into the intricacies of problem management within a microservices environment. We discuss the power of predictive problem management and the tools you can leverage to solve problems. We also explore the realm of complex systems and the strategies that can help identify probable causes of problems, specifically focusing on the Safety 1 and Safety 2 models. All this is aimed at equipping you and your teams with a systematic approach to problem-solving, reducing chances of catastrophic failure through proper service contracts, smaller batches, and fast releases. 

This week's takeaways:

• Problems are ubiquitous: Problems exist everywhere, but organizations often lack a formal approach to addressing them.
• Take the time to understand problems: Instead of reacting to problems instinctively, organizations should create a space for thoughtful, data-driven problem-solving. 
• Establish a common understanding of problems: Having a common agreement and language within the organization is crucial regarding what constitutes a problem. 

As we navigate these complex topics, we ensure that you come away with a deeper understanding and practical solutions you can implement in your organization. Tune in! Be sure to listen to Definitely Maybe Agile on your favorite platform, and remember to subscribe. For additional resources and to join the conversation, contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Stay tuned for more exciting content!

Furthermore, we'll spotlight non-functional requirements and their vital role in business resilience. We'll show you why it's crucial for your teams to be autonomous and how to manage system changes without triggering unanticipated impacts. We'll also touch on the rising observability movement and its role in making non-functional requirements more conspicuous. From discussing design and architecture to system latency and changes, we hope to provide valuable insights into non-functional requirements. 

This week's takeaways:

• Don't overlook non-functional requirements - they're crucial for the resilience of your business.
• Understand the impact of changes on your system with observability at the forefront.
• Take a comprehensive approach to business resilience planning, considering all aspects of your business.
• Make sure everyone is aware of the business resilience plan and knows their role in executing it.

So, buckle up for an enlightening journey through the nitty-gritty details of business resilience! Be sure to listen to Definitely Maybe Agile on your favorite platform, and remember to subscribe. For additional resources and to join the conversation, visit our website and contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Stay tuned for more exciting content! 

This week's takeaways:

• Centralized decision-making and hub and spoke models can hinder teamwork and cause confusion.
• Collaboration goes beyond breaking down silos; it requires a shared purpose and aligned goals across teams and units.
• Addressing bottlenecks, maintaining work transparency, and considering the entire system are crucial to avoid overload and disenfranchisement.
• It's important to consider structural and behavioral aspects to foster effective collaboration. 

Resources: 

Sloan Management Review: When Collaboration Fails and How to Fix It- https://corporateinnovation.mit.edu/2021/05/18/sloan-management-review-when-collaboration-fails-and-how-to-fix-it/

Ready to revolutionize your workplace collaboration? Don't miss this insightful episode! Be sure to listen to Definitely Maybe Agile on your favorite platform, and remember to subscribe. For additional resources and to join the conversation, visit our website and contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Click that subscribe button and stay tuned for more exciting content!

• The economics of cost saving and optimization can have a detrimental effect on digital product development. 
• The mindset of "plan to create options" is essential for digital product development. 
• The lessons learned from digital product development can be applied to other areas of the business, such as operations.

Resources:
Six Myths of Product Development- https://hbr.org/2012/05/six-myths-of-product-development

Contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Hit subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases. Join us in this captivating exploration of product development myths, and gain fresh insights into crafting effective strategies for the digital era. 

 This week's takeaways:

• Try to predict what customers will do with your new functionality.
• Think of the many ways you might measure the impact of your new functionality.
• Involve all stakeholders in the validation process.

 Contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Remember to subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases.

 This week's takeaways:

•  Try “two-out, one-in," as it can be a valuable technique for teams overwhelmed with too much work in progress.
• Make sure everything is captured as work. Visibility is a key first step.
• Sharing the visibility of the team's workload and its capacity with stakeholders can lead to a better understanding of the team's constraints and workload.

Resources: Video Lucy and the Chocolate Factory: https://youtu.be/NkQ58I53mjk

Join the conversation by contacting us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases. So, brace yourself for an insightful conversation as Peter and David showcase how to navigate the complexities of adopting new working methods while managing work overload.

• Have a toolkit of different frameworks and models.
• Measure the right thing.
• Context is King.

Contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Hit subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases. Don't miss out on this insightful discussion on effective problem-solving strategies in the agile world. Expand your toolkit and enhance your problem-solving skills with the expert advice featured in this episode.

• Find your tribe.
• Prepare in advance.
• Embrace informal networking opportunities.
• Don't be afraid to leave if it's not serving your goals.

 Join the conversation by contacting us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases. And remember, conferences can be an absolute blast and an enriching learning experience rolled into one!

• Ensure architects are actively involved in specific business domains or architecture, rather than being temporary consultants.
• Remember that architecture is not solely the responsibility of a select few; it permeates all levels of the organization.
• Avoid relying too heavily on Architectural Review Boards (ARBs) as they can impede decision-making and hinder innovation. Instead, prioritize empowering architects to make informed decisions and collaborate regularly with relevant stakeholders.

Join the conversation by contacting us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases. Let us uncover the potential of Agile Architecture together! 

•  OKRs are a goal-setting framework are effective at creating alignment and, though simple on the surface, they take practice to get right.
• They are not meant to be static but rather should be updated and adjusted as new information becomes available.
• It should not be tied to performance reviews or bonuses. Instead, they should be used as a tool for setting ambitious goals and tracking progress.

To join the discussion, email us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Remember to hit that subscribe button to stay updated on our latest releases.   Tune in, and let us help you revolutionize the way your organization marches towards achieving its goals. 

• Recognize that individuals are at the core of any transformation effort.
• Incorporating "slack" into work life can bring balance and productivity.
• Continuous learning and improvement are crucial in transformation.

To join the discussion, email us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Remember to hit that subscribe button to stay updated on our latest releases. 

• Allow space for emotions and feelings to be expressed in conversations and listen for the answer rather than coming in with preconceived ideas.
• New roles in government. The public sector is increasingly adopting new roles, such as product owner. These roles allow public servants to take on more responsibility and ownership of their work.
• Compassion is essential in both public and private sector leadership.

To join the discussion, email us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Remember to hit that subscribe button to stay updated on our latest releases. 

• Change itself has changed: Making change a natural part of learning, responding, and growing helps remove the fear and resistance associated with it.
• Applying the four principles at each organizational layer: It's important to consider the needs and recognition of the organization as a whole, not just individuals or teams.
• Instead of forcefully pushing tools and practices onto individuals or teams, providing support and focusing on how people are measured, recognized, and rewarded is more effective.

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• It's essential to understand the customer's needs and motivations.
• Emphasizing an emergent strategy allows you to rapidly iterate, improve, and build upon your product based on customer feedback and market insights.
• Find the balance between exploration (observing, listening, empathizing) and exploitation (accelerating product delivery).

We would love to hear from you! Share your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. And remember to subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases. 

• The value of taking time out as a leadership team. Stepping away from the daily grind can help leadership teams address dysfunctions.
• The benefit of investing in teams. When teams are allowed to work together, they surpass expectations and progress faster. 
• The importance of fostering an environment for collaboration. Investing in teams and enabling effective collaboration leads to greater value creation and faster progress.

Resources: 

• The Tuckman Model: A Roadmap for Team Development and Success- https://medium.com/@williammeller/the-tuckman-model-of-team-development-c0b3fbdce0de
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21343.The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Team

We would love to hear from you! Share your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. And remember to subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases.

• Understand the why. Having a clear understanding of the why will help to guide the transformation and ensure that it is successful.
• Create a safe environment. In a safe environment, people feel comfortable enough to speak up resulting in a greater willingness to share ideas and take risks.
• Ensure digital literacy. The board of directors should have a basic understanding of digital technology.  We talk through how to make this happen.

Resources:
Turn Your Ship Around!: A Workbook for Implementing Intent-Based Leadership in Your Organization -https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22529128-turn-your-ship-around

We would love to hear from you! Share your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. And remember to subscribe to stay updated on our latest releases. 

• Ownership is not just about individual employees. It is also about teams and organizations as a whole.
• It doesn't come for free, it takes effort and commitment from everyone involved.
• Creating a culture of ownership is an ongoing journey. It is important to be open to feedback and change.

Resources:

• Eric's new blog post - https://ericbrooke.blog/2023/05/10/ownership-in-small-and-medium-technology-companies-part-1/
• Learning Domain-Driven Design: Aligning Software Architecture and Business Strategy - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57573212

To join the discussion, email us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button to stay updated on our latest releases.  So, let's dive in!

• It allows teams to have a concept of strategy for themselves.
• When embarking on an organizational change, do not do it alone.
• Create a culture of inclusion and collaboration to empower employees to take ownership of their work.

Resources:
Mike Freislich  - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikefreislich/ https://www.wedochange.io/

To join the discussion, email us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com with your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button to stay updated on our latest releases.  So, let's dive in! 

• AI could be seen as an augmentation of human capabilities rather than a replacement. This can accelerate learning and problem-solving.
• It's important to understand and evaluate the output of AI tools, as they may not always be correct.
• We should start experimenting with AI now, but always be ready to take back control if needed.

Feedback is always welcome, including questions, topic suggestions, or participation in a conversation, by emailing feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Hit the subscribe button for the podcast to stay updated on the latest episodes. 

•  We should enjoy what we do
• Don't try copying somebody else model
• The focus on the method vs. the outcome

"The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation"- Russell Ackoff.  Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. As Peter Drucker observed, profit is to a corporation as oxygen is to a human being: necessary for existence, not the reason for it. A corporation that fails to provide an adequate return for their investment to its employees and customers is just as likely to fail as one that does not reward its shareholders adequately.

Feedback is always welcome, including questions, topic suggestions, or participation in a conversation, by emailing feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for the podcast to stay updated on the latest episodes. 

• Understand the system, don't blame the people
• Environment determines commitment
• Clear and aligned incentive drives behaviour and reinforced by structure

Resources:
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups-  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33517721-the-culture-code
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness-  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3450744-nudge

Feedback is always welcome, including questions, topic suggestions, or participation in a conversation, by emailing feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for the podcast to stay updated on the latest episodes.

• Understanding the end-to-end system needs and treating the problem space correctly
• Making small incremental changes to systems can be life-changing and empowering for teams
• Enabling teams to make small changes should be the goal
• The approach to achieving this goal will depend on the systems being worked with and how they need to evolve

Feedback is always welcome, including questions, topic suggestions, or participation in a conversation, by emailing feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for the podcast to stay updated on the latest episodes. 

• A leader's success should also be measured by their availability and response time to team members.
• Growing leaders around them is a sign of a great leader.
• Safety in tough decisions is important for leaders to create a safe conversation.
• It's important for leaders to recognize and grow the people around them to create the next generation of leaders.

We are always eager to receive your feedback! If you have any questions, would like to suggest a topic, or even participate in a conversation, please don't hesitate to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. Also, be sure to hit the subscribe button for our podcast to stay updated on our latest episodes. 

• How do you create outcomes that are relevant?
• Empathy is a change agent super-power
• How to Guide- Facilitator driven

Resources:

• Agendashift- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35439273-agendashift?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_11
• OI-SR- https://www.agendashift.com/resources/oi-sdr
• OI-SR Template- https://www.agendashift.com/resources/oi-sr-template 

 We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

• Understand the different stages of adoption, practices, and people.
• Different methods and techniques are needed for different groups of people, depending on their journey.

 We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com