Arguing Agile: Product Management, Business Leadership, & Org Design
We're seeking to prepare you to better deal with real-life challenges to business agility by discussing the real arguments you will encounter as you progress through your career. Arguing Agile is hosted by a Product Manager and a Business Coach who explore experience from their careers, share stories, and suggest advice to other professionals. We seek to do these things while maintaining an unbiased position from any financial interest.
Episodes
Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel break down why the "should we kill this feature" is really a trap, why the data won't save you, and why the CEO's pet project survives on rank - not merit. Our promise to you is, by the end, you'll have four questions to ask instead, and a framework for sunsetting features without extra hel...
Most "people problems" are structural problems wearing a human face mask.
Product Manager Brian and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om dissect Molly Graham's Waterline Model! Listen or watch as we debate whether this framework is the most actionable restatement of systems thinking in decades or just Deming in a wetsuit. Stick around to the end and you'll know exactly where your org skips diagnosis and jumps straight to bl...
The best mentor you've ever had can't get you promoted.
Not won't - can't.
Product Manager Brian and Business Agility Coach Om draw a hard line between mentors and sponsors, showing why advice never reaches the room where promotions actually happen.
Listen or watch to learn how to audit your current sponsor for belief, power, and breadth - the exact questions that separate advocates from people who ...
Your job description was written to get you hired, not help you know if a decision is your to make.
That gap between what's on paper and who actually decides is where careers go to die.
Experience & Process Improvement Leader Clint Murt once again joins Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel in a debate on why job descriptions and/or job role descriptions may buy false ...
Brian and Om dissect Keith Rabois' (in)famous "How to Operate" talk, exposing the dehumanizing logic behind "barrels and ammunition," the cult of heroic effort, and why grading managers on output-per-head creates a fear-based culture.
What Brian and Om get into:
• Why the "people are irrational" premise is a c...
Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel trace the industrialized pipeline behind LinkedIn's 'thought leadership' industry; from Filipino Virtual Assistants feeding prompts to ChatGPT, to state actors using the same tactics (and sometime the same tools) for influence operations. By the end, ...
Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel discuss and debate why that reflex costs you promotions, sponsorship, and credibility, and how to rewire it before your boss stops asking entirely.
By the end, you'll have a five-line cheat sheet to pull from so you're never caught flat-footed again!...
A PE bankruptcy specialist and BCG partner walk into a bar...
Just kidding, they walked into HBR... and they're trying to sell you a framework!
Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel dissect the April HBR piece arguing that "consensus decision-making doesn't work in the AI era." By the end, you'll spot the sales funnel dressed as thought leadership, understand who profits from "a...
The damage from your Q1 goal doesn't show up until Q3, on someone else's dashboard, after the person who flagged it got fired.
Part 2 of the Outcome Trap series. Brian and Om argue why you can't see the trap from inside it: second-order effects land too late to trace, the people who spot trouble get removed, and the truth fractures across team dashboards until nobody owns the whole picture. By the end you'll have questions t...
The thing everyone agrees is the right way to work has quietly produced some of the worst corporate ethics violations in modern history.
Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel discuss and debate how outcome-based goals can and often do go catastrophically wrong - from Facebook to Wells Fargo - and introduce a stakeholder outcome mapping tool you can use immediately.
Listen or wat...
Six companies, seven days, same playbook.
Welcome to the modern age where the excuses are interchangeable, the points don't matter, and ALL the strategies are not-so-secretly the same! Listen or watch as Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel talk through this month's round of layoffs and expose why Cloudflare's AI-first cuts and Fidelity's RTO-to-layoff pipeline aren't strategic ...
Is AI actually helping us escape the build trap, or just helping us build the wrong things faster?
In this episode of Arguing Agile, hosts Brian Orlando and Om Patel discuss the new AI4Agile Practitioners Report 2026 from Scrum.org. The data reveals a startling trend: while 83% of practitioners have access to AI tools, the primary fear isn't job replacement, it's that AI is becoming a "supercharged way into the feature facto...
Is the State of Agile Report a clear-eyed snapshot of the industry - or a sales brochure?
In this episode of Arguing Agile, hosts Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel are joined by returning guest Ed Martin to dissect the 18th State of Agile Report from Digital.ai. Applying the economic theory of the 'Market for Lemons,' where asymmetric information leads to market failure, ...
Every PM is scrambling to learn AI tools - but is that a trap?
In this episode of Arguing Agile, hosts Brian Orlando and Om Patel summarize Shreyas Doshi's provocative article "Why Product Sense Is the Only Product Skill That Will Matter in the AI Age." Using the article as background for our discussion, we explore whether AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and NotebookLM are genuine superpowers for product managers or just...
Stop burning time and money on agile theater! In this podcast, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel strip business agility back to its absolute basics: no buzzwords, no frameworks - just the organizational muscles you need to survive.
Listen or watch as we introduce and explain the five non-negotiable capabilities: Sensing and Responding (market feedback loops), Speed to Dec...
Businesses killed QA with bad org design, but with AI, is there potential for a near-term QA boom?
Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel as we discuss the systematic elimination of QA roles over the past decade and discuss why that decision is now backfiring.
That's right, with AI-generated code accelerating at breakneck speed and nobody to properly check or test it, Br...
Meta and Amazon are cutting managers, but is it efficiency or chaos?
Is de-layering, or flattening your org chart, good for a company, or is it a recipe for destruction?
Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel as we wade into the murky pool that is the latest of corporate trends - "un-bossing" or the mass sacrifice of middle management and mid-level coordination roles on the u...
Today, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel are taking on the "IKEA Effect."
The IKEA effect is the cognitive bias that causes product managers and leaders to overvalue the things they build - simply because they built them! That's right, today we're tackling a bias that's led to so...
AI product manager jobs are everywhere - but are they really different from regular PM roles?
In this episode of Arguing Agile, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel wade deep into the muck-filled pool of hype vs. reality around AI-specific product management roles.
Listen or watch to join us as we do the dirty work of discovering if most AI PM job descriptions are jus...
AI had little to no impact on productivity in the past 3 years.
This was according to a National Bureau of Economic Research survey released in February 2006 of 6,000 CEOs and executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia.
Instead of throwing fruit at us, watch or listen as Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando discuss why it won't be the loudest Silicon Valley ...
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