Essentials for Effective LPM Aug 07, 2024

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...

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Crafting Clarity: Using Feature Templates to Shape and Communicate Intent Jul 21, 2024

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...

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Understanding and changing your constraints Jul 16, 2024

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...

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What is executive commitment, really? Jul 08, 2024

If only our executives would commit, we could…

“They” don’t support what we’re trying to do…

 

Interesting words. What do you really want from “them”? Who is this “them” anyway? Is it one leader? Is it a team? Is it really the...

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What do I ask in an Empathy Interview? Jan 01, 2024

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...

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Are you ready for your empathy interviews? Dec 31, 2023

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...

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What is an empathy interview? Dec 30, 2023

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...

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Shaping Agility for fun and... more fun! Oct 25, 2023

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...

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Announcing Leading Effective Agile Change Oct 14, 2023

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...

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What a year! Oct 01, 2023

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...

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Pirate metrics for agile transformations May 17, 2023

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...

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Why two types of value streams? Apr 11, 2023

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...

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