Ten Essential LPM Behaviors

Don’t cripple your LPM implementation

A few years back I helped several large companies in adopting lean portfolio approaches at the same time, and the same set of questions around “what matters most?” kept coming up. People found the “do...

One of my favorite exercises in our Product Owner Program involves asking the students to review a sample feature canvas and compare it to the features they currently prepare for PI Planning.  I measure the effectiveness of an exercise by the commitment to action that follows the...

As I'm teaching today*, I was reminded of a way I used to describe system constraints back when I taught a lot of kanban classes and helped design kanban systems. This quick post captures them for reference and to seed a discussion. 

This post was originally created in 2020, and was recently...

This is a republished post from ~2017 that was originally hosted on ericwilleke.com. It is part of a four-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) on how to use empathy interviews to prepare for facilitated events with unfamiliar people and teams. - Eric Willeke

The hardest part of preparing...

This is a republished post from ~2017 that was originally hosted on ericwilleke.com. It is part of a four-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) on how to use empathy interviews to prepare for facilitated events with unfamiliar people and teams. - Eric Willeke

Empathy...

A customer recently asked how I defined an “empathy interview.” Because she needed to explain it to the leadership team around her, I needed to provide a better answer than my typical stammering about “understanding” and “being ready” and...

A week ago, Mark Richards shared a post introducing the community we’ve been shaping for the last few months. It’s been a really enjoyable collaboration getting to this point, and I can’t wait to explore and experience what it looks like next. As Mark introduced, we’ve...

This is a really fun post to write. A couple of weeks ago I posted about my gap year and the reflections on what really drives me. This week I’m excited to put the new Leading Effective Agile Change program out to the world! I'm also a bit nervous, to be honest, and I’ll likely write...

Well, what a year! Last October, I decided it was time to take an extended break for the first time in my career. I wasn't sure when I set out if it would be a sabbatical, a gap year, or permanent semi-retirement. Over the first few months, I decided a year was the right horizon. I committed to...

While working on my workshop for XP2023 in Amsterdam this morning I was trying to minimize my opinions on metrics and agility into a single sentence. While doing so, I briefly considered a tangential thought about "What would it look like to use the pirate metrics to measure agile...

I find that people struggle to intuitively understand the difference between an operational value stream and a development value stream in SAFe. This blog post provides simple, clear distinctions to help people reason about their organization and the difference between the two. The concepts exist...