April 3, 2025 • 40 mins
In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, host Dave West and Yuval Yeret, Professional Scrum Trainer and SAFe Fellow explore how the Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) can enhance the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). They discuss the shift from a rigid "feature factory" approach to a dynamic "lab" environment that fosters experimentation and value discovery. Yuval highlights the need to evolve SAFe to better support product-oriented organizations, highlighting practical steps like the Portfolio Agility Trail Map. Tune in to learn how SAFe and APOM can work together and other considerations.
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Episode Transcript
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Dave West (00:13):
Dave, Hello, welcome to the scrum.org community
podcast. I'm your host. DaveWest, CEO, here@scrum.org and
today's podcast will focus onsafe and a palm or their long
titles, the Agile productoperating model and the Scaled
Agile Framework. Wow. Anyway, sotoday I'm joined by Yuval,
(00:36):
Yvette PST and safe fellow.
Welcome to the podcast, yourVal,
Yuval Yeret (00:41):
great to be back again. Dave, it's
Dave West (00:43):
it's great to have a safe fellow and somebody that's
heavily involved in theevolution of the Agile product
operating model on this podcast,because I got lots of questions.
And before we get to that,though, I want to tell our
listeners the genesis of this.
So this podcast actually cameout of a recent webinar,
navigate, navigating,navigating, navigating safe with
(01:06):
professional Scrum. Thosediscussions and questions got me
thinking about the relationshipbetween a palm and safe, and
that's the reason why I askedyou, Val to spend some time with
me today so I can pick his brainabout that. So hope you've, hope
you've got your thinking cap onyour Val. What is the
(01:30):
relationship? This was thequestion actually from the
webinar. What is therelationship between the Agile
product, operating model andScaled Agile Framework. Are they
friends? Are they rivals? Arethey best buddies? What is the
relationship? Can Can youdescribe it for our listeners?
Yeah,
Yuval Yeret (01:50):
the way I like to look at it, and it's inspired
what I'm trying to do in thetrenches these days is that
safe? Can be a way to implementor instantiate an agile product
operating model in anorganization so beyond the high
(02:13):
talk of being customer centricand having empowered product
teams and steering withevidence. And moving from
projects to products, you needto do something in the trenches.
You need to organize into thoseempowered product teams, and
sometimes teams of teams thatneed to work together, if your
(02:34):
architecture, you know, doesn'treally allow you to fully
decouple the organization. Somost organizations, as they're
trying to think about, how do weactually make significant steps
toward having an edge working inan agile product operating
model, they look at some sort ofagile approach. They could use
(02:59):
Scrum, if they're very small,they could use, you know,
different scaling frameworks.
Safe is the most popular scalingframework these days, so a lot
of organizations are using itfor this purpose. The other way
to think about it is, if youlook at how most organizations
(03:20):
have implemented agile untilnow, including using Save. A lot
of those organizations havecreated feature factories, or,
you know, I'm doing some work onthe portfolio level, so I call
it the mega factory. You mightcall it the giga factory, if
you're a fan of a certain EVbrand, fewer and fewer of those
(03:44):
these days. But those arefactories, while what we're
trying to create are labs. We'retrying to create an environment
where we're actually discoveringvalue and iterating towards
value and validating value andthe product operating model, and
especially the evidence basedaspect that, you know, we talk
(04:07):
about as part of a POM reallyhelps level up safe
implementations. I've used itmore than once in the trenches
to help organizations see whatwe're trying to really create
with safe beyond the mechanics,beyond the theater.
Dave West (04:29):
I mean, you said so much there, Yuval, and I want to
unpack it, I think, for ourlisteners. So I want to start
with the last thing that yousaid, which was to go from
factories to labs. Now thatsounds like, you know, a t shirt
rather than anything, but it isactually very profound, because
ultimately, most organizationswant the efficiency and the
(04:52):
structure of a factory, and mostimplementations of safe, I
think, echo that whereeverything goes through Lean
portfolio. Leo management teamsultimately are optimized around
the work, not around the value.
You know, you you see that theywant an efficient factory, but,
but, but unlike a factory, afactory works on a product
(05:15):
that's well defined with verylittle variability. That's what
Lean taught us right Six Sigma,those things, what we're talking
about, the product that we'reworking on isn't one of those.
Usually, it's more like what youwould be doing in a lab. You
have a hypothesis, you defineexperiments. You deliver them,
you try. You know, you and yes,they provide value. You know
(05:36):
being delivered. You know thepill helps you or whatever, but
ultimately, you observe thebehavior and the outcomes,
learn, and it refreshes likethat. But that's an incredibly
different philosophy than mostorganizations want their
technical capabilities ortechnology or digital
(05:57):
capabilities to be deliveredunder. So I think that's really
a profound difference. Do you dowhen you, when you say that you
know and and you know you're notprinting your T shirts, though
you really should, and that'sreally cool. That's, you know,
should definitely trademark it,but the or copyright it, maybe
because you can't trademark aphrase. But anyway, so when you
(06:21):
when you say that to theleaders, like the people you're
working with at the moment inChicago or wherever you're
getting off every week, what dothey say? Do they get it?
Yuval Yeret (06:34):
I haven't used that metaphor enough so far. I'm
working on using it more but,but they're getting it in
classic product developmentworlds. People are getting that.
You know, the feature factoriesdon't make sense the the
(06:57):
conversation at the but it'sreally important to take the
conversation from thetheoretical slow t shirt slogans
to what you actually do and likewe like we talk about in
evidence based management and inproduct discovery, shaping work
items, around bets, around anhypothesis, around an outcome,
(07:22):
and keeping what you actuallydeliver flexible. A lot of the
work that I do right now is onworking, let's say, with leaders
of portfolio and looking attheir Kanban boards, with all of
the initiatives on that Kanbanboard, and trying to discern
which of these initiatives aredescribing a body of work, what
(07:47):
we call output, or evenactivities, sometimes, and which
of them describe outputs thatare more what we would like to
see in a product environment,because those outcomes with
leading indicators of are weactually seeing traction or
evidence towards those outcomes?
Now let product teams figure outa way. Now we can give those
(08:11):
product teams a lab environmentwhere they're saying, This is
what we're trying to find. Let'stry different things to find the
right solution. Now, we'rereally in a new product
development environment, ratherthan, you know, a manufacturing
environment, a feature factory.
But that's
Dave West (08:31):
the key thing. So I think that's the thing that's so
interesting. You know, I have alittle bit of experience with
labs, from working with a feworganizations that do it. And
actually, my wife sold genetictests for a while, and I learned
(08:52):
a lot about genetic tests anddoctors, which was super
interesting. And sort of myexperience of labs is the
variability and the ability tochange. You know that there is
some level of efficiency in it,like they have set number of
processes. However, they arecontinuously monitoring those
(09:12):
processes to improve them.
Because ultimately, the theprocesses affect the outcomes,
and the outcomes affect theprocesses and blah, blah, blah.
So I think that's reallyinteresting, because one of my
challenges to say, for myobservation of how it's been
implemented, is they take it asthough they're not building a
lab, they're building a factory.
(09:35):
They take all the practices,they take every and they apply
it. I don't want to say Route,Route, Lee, you know, as per, as
per, the training classes, thematerials for, you know. And
there we go. And this is it. Andthat, I think, is a criticism
that I think is fair when it'sleveled against safe. By the
(09:57):
way, I know that safe itselfsays no. You shouldn't do that,
but, you know, it's hard.
Yuval Yeret (10:04):
Yeah, I think we have, I think there are three
loops of learning, ofimprovement that we need to
think about. Yeah, there's theactual manufacturing floor, the
actual product. And when we'rein the digital world. We don't
really need to manufacture thatproduct. It's there, yeah,
(10:25):
that's where a lot of you know,this metaphor breaks down. But
if we were making, I don't know,orange juice, like my my father
was, you know, as the headchemist for, you know, a factory
in Israel, or POM Granat juice,more recently, there's actually
(10:47):
making the juice. You want zerovariability in making the juice,
and you want to have very formalISO certified, whatever
production lines that you knowfrom time to time, you want to
be able to change. You want tobe able to improve the
production line, and you want toplay around with different
(11:09):
recipes for the juice that makeit more addictive, healthier,
whatever, whatever you're tryingto optimize for. That's new
product development. That'swhat's happening in the lab,
where people with the whitecoats are well, the production
floor is running in the lab. Youuse different processes. You
(11:32):
want faster feedback times.
You're okay with variability.
You're okay with today, we'lltry something, and there's a
good chance that it would notwork. Now there's a third level
that I think you're talkingabout, which is creating the
right lab operating system.
Yeah, and are we can we actuallyturn around faster in the lab?
(11:55):
Can we use new equipment thatmakes us more effective, more
efficient. Can we reduce waste?
Can we do more with the samepeople? Can we use AI to find,
you know, recipes out of the1000 possible or millions
possible recipes, which are theones we should start with, like
(12:15):
our friends in you know, thebiotech industry in the Boston
area are trying to leverage AIfor these things, yeah,
developing those capabilitiesand changing, you know, the
interactions between the peopleand the different steps in the
lab is also something that youwant to change. I think your
criticism for safe is about issafe itself dynamic enough that
(12:48):
it would allow you to changeyour lab as frequently as you'd
like? I think there's valid thatthat's valid criticism, both for
safe and for Scrum, thatsomething in the way we deploy
these approaches and theindustrial complex around them
(13:11):
has made it very hard for peopleto see that they can actually
use them as frameworks and notmethodologies, Even though both
are called frameworks, Scrum isa framework, and safe is a
framework. They both should bestarting points. They both
should be, you know, adapted foryour needs as an organization.
(13:32):
But it's hard for organizationsto realize that. It's much
easier to apply themconsistently across 1000s of
people that that's i Yes, that'sa thing for sure. I think if you
another interesting questionthat we might we could do some
(13:57):
thinking about, I've done somethinking about it is out of the
box, does safe as a framework,support an agile product,
operating model, or do you needto? Are there major
incompatibilities that we needto do something about? So can
it? So what I've seen is that itmostly can. Like there are,
(14:24):
there are some gaps. If you lookat safe portfolio level, it does
talk about outcome orientation.
It does talk about an epichypothesis. It does talk about
the MVP cycle. If you look atagile product development in
safe which is what you do at theedge of release train level. It
does talk about productmanagement and empowering
(14:45):
product owners, and, you know,having a benefit hypothesis for
the features that you choosethat allows you flexibility in
what are the stories that you'llactually choose to implement for
that? Feature, having said thatthe fact that you focus on
features rather than outcomes isan issue. So that's something
(15:07):
I'm working on. What might safelook like without features, or
what could replace or how, at aminimum, what I'm doing right
now is making sure that thefeatures, even though that's the
name of the entity, are mostlyoutcome oriented. That's the
minimum viable change, you know,without changing too much. And
(15:30):
of course, when people go intopi planning, you know, the
planning, increment quarterlyplanning, that's such a core
part of safe a lot of the time,what they plan is outputs, and
they go way too deep intoplanning outputs, for sometimes
a good reason, like the genesisof this is we want to have
(15:53):
enough understanding of thedependencies and what we will
need from each other to have arealistic plan to improve the
predictability of organizationsthat are often totally
unpredictable with very lowtrust from the rest of the
organization. So quarterlyplanning, the safe style,
(16:17):
improves that but needs to bereimagined for, you know, a
truly product orientedorganization, I can share that.
What I'm seeing in the trenchesis that a lot of times you talk
about product orientation, andyou want to aim towards that,
but your business stakeholders,the people that are going to
(16:40):
leverage those products theyfirst, you know, want to build
the trust that you have thecapability to deliver. You talk
to them about trust us, we areable to deliver those outcomes,
or tell us what outcomes youwant, not you know, what are the
projects that you really need?
And they're not at that level oftrust, to really empower you to
(17:06):
hunt those outcomes they wantfirst, to see that you can
actually deliver that's like achicken and egg problem that you
face when you're implementingproduct orientation.
Dave West (17:18):
I do want to, I mean, I see that all the time, that
ultimately the trust, whether itbe explicit or implicit, is kind
of missing, which requires thislevel of planning you're
describing. It requires youknow, the understanding of
dependencies, the understandingof critical path, which
ultimately makes it more likeworks being done at the team
(17:42):
level, less value is beingdelivered. But I just you talked
about income is safe incomplete,and you highlighted some areas
particularly not incomplete, butdoesn't sort of takes you in the
wrong. Maybe features takes youin the wrong direction. Maybe
the portfolio playing processcould be a little bit more
outcome centric and lessrigorous. You know, did it? Did
(18:05):
etc. There's also things missingfrom safe, you know, in terms
of, they don't talk aboutincentives, they don't really
talk about, well, to myknowledge, and obviously, you're
a safe fellow, Yuval, and youcan put me right here, but what
I am thinking increasingly isyou have to approach each
product holistically and buildan operating model that supports
(18:27):
that. So things like incentivesneed to be in place and aligned.
You need to ensure thatgovernance processes that aren't
the delivery processes or thedevelopment or the discovery
processes, governance issomething different need to be
well understood, you know, andappropriate measures put in
place. You need to think a lotabout organization structure,
(18:51):
and you know, how do you dothat? You know, particularly if
you're building cross functionalteams, you need to think of
that. Now, I know that there's,there's lots of case studies and
other materials that talk aboutthose things in the context of
safe but, but that sort ofholistic chain unit of change
approach, I think, is missingfrom what I've observed,
(19:13):
certainly from the way I've seenit implemented. Most people
implement it in their existingorganizations, with their
existing incentives, with theirexisting governance processes,
and then shoehorn it in, asopposed to making a I don't want
to say it is a significantchange to change to a product
operating model, but what's yourexperience? There? Am I wrong?
(19:36):
And I'm just, you know sort of
Yuval Yeret (19:38):
you're not wrong that most organizations are
implementing safe theater.
You're not wrong that. I mean,I'm not seeing that as very
different than the scrum theaterI'm seeing out there.
Dave West (19:52):
No, completely agree.
Don't say any different. Iwouldn't
Yuval Yeret (19:56):
the way I look at it, a lot of the questions and.
Aspects that you're talkingabout. Safe does have a
perspective on them. Safe doestalk about governance. It does
talk about the choices that youcan make around organizational
topology. Let's call it that it,you know, allows you flexibility
(20:16):
on organizational structure. AndI think that makes sense. It
talks about the dual operatingsystem, and the fact, yeah, in
order to create a productoriented organization, it
doesn't call it that, but ittalks about the value oriented
network. And organizing aroundvalue is a key part of of safe
(20:40):
moving away from traditionalfunding models and governance
models towards leaner, moreproduct oriented ones are part
of safe they just come with somuch other stuff that a lot of
organizations are missing. Youknow, the connection between
(21:02):
product orientation and what'sthere in save and it's also some
of the things that are harder toimplement than, you know, pi
planning, although aconversation with you know, a
lady at the big bank yesterdayreminds me how hard it is to get
(21:22):
people into a room, even avirtual one, and spending time
together. So let's put thataside. But there are harder
things about becoming a productoriented organization. Those are
typically also the harder thingsabout Scrum and the harder
things about safe. So I thinkwhat we need to acknowledge is
(21:45):
the dynamics in the market theyou know, there's a series of
organizations and the consultingecosystem around those
organizations that has tried toimplement Scrum, to help those
organizations become more agileand to make money along the way,
(22:07):
that got those organizationssomewhere and made those
consulting firms quite a bit ofMoney. Also, the certification
bodies have benefited as well,but that hasn't gotten
organizations to really be agilebecause they were afraid of
(22:28):
making some of those changes.
They you know, those are hardchanges. So there was another
round, the round of scalingagile safe, you know, was
brought in to do that otherorganizations use this Spotify
model or large scale Scrum, orscrum at scale. Everybody tried
to build the thing that will beused in, you know, in that, in
(22:52):
that more recent cycle. But eventhat didn't really get us the
results that we need. Becauseorganizations, again, we're
looking for a silver bullet, notto really reorganize around
value, not to really changetheir governance model, or to
break the silos between thebusiness and the product
(23:13):
organization. Some organizationsat that point, you know,
implemented a lot of prop orintroduced a lot of product
owners to their organization,but didn't really have a product
organization. I have P I haveorganizations which have, I'm
working with organizations thathave hundreds of product owners
but still don't have a chiefproduct officer for the
(23:34):
organization because theyhaven't really made that change?
Yes. And now there's the newthing, which is, okay, another
round. We can sell anotherconsulting gig, you know, to
these organizations. We can'tsell a scaled, agile gig
anymore. We can potentiallysell, you know, let's go product
(23:59):
oriented. At this point, I thinkthere's a lot of potential in
that. I want to be theoptimistic and, you know,
realize that change for thesemega organizations that have so
much history so many systems.
(24:21):
It's hard. It's just naturalthat it takes those
organizations time to implementthese changes. And you know, the
way, you know, we can managethat change that will take, I
don't know, a decade for anorganization to really transform
is, you know, to do it throughthree different cycles. One
(24:42):
cycle is the team level agile.
Another is the Agile led scaleand the you know now it's the
product, and maybe we'll needanother round, and that is okay.
What what we should try to avoidis for this new round of. This
product oriented, productoperating model to be just
(25:02):
another layer of veneer on topof the things we really do, if
on the other end, it does, youknow, get us one step further on
the journey a bit more outcomeoriented, a bit more empowered,
a bit more evidence orientedthan empiric, then I'm all for
(25:25):
you know this, this latest stagein the in the journey of
organizations, I'm all on board.
Yeah,
Dave West (25:35):
I'm more optimistic than pessimistic. You know, the
pessimist in me goes well. Wetried it with Scrum. We tried it
with scale. Now we're trying itwith product. It's all the same
old thing. It will fail. Theoptimist, which is more my
natural bias, believes thatactually, at team level, we did
some amazing things. Peopleactually deliver stuff. Now, you
(25:57):
know, done is maybe not 100%done, but it's pretty close,
better than it was testing isthat, you know, testing, there
are separate testingorganizations, maybe in the IV
and V area, independentverification and validation, but
at the team level, you wewouldn't we mix those
disciplines. Now, when I startedwork, testing was a whole
(26:19):
different department withdifferent people who were no fun
at parties, usually. And nowit's all more integrated,
integrating the fun, I guess, orwhatever. So, you know, and then
scaling has actually helped inplaces, you know. I think that
what you're talking about, youknow, pi planning, even though
(26:40):
it drives me mad that we, thatteams, that most of the work
that teams do come from piplanning, which drives me
insane. And that's something Iknow, you and I both agree on,
but it has actually unified andgiven a cadence and taken some
complexity out of out of thesituation. You know, some of the
(27:01):
the release train thing hasdefinitely helped, you know, in
terms of integrated releases,that when it, when you've got
1000s of people, or hundreds ofpeople working on 1000s of
systems, you know, there's thatwe definitely evolved. And I
think the product is, isdefinitely the next evolution on
that, which I am also optimisticthat will break down that divide
(27:24):
between business and technologywill simplify the alignment of
people to outcomes, willoptimize the sort of like the
focus of a lab rather thanfactory mentality, as you called
it. I'm very optimistic aboutthat. Do you though, do you
(27:46):
think that you talked abouttrying to make some changes to
the to safe with that regard? Doyou think that safe is going to
start taking more of the productmodel nomenclature up, you know?
Or do you, you know, the lastrelease was, from what I
understand, is all aboutsimplification, which was, which
is great and needed, and Iappreciate that work. But do you
(28:09):
think that that, that it, thatit will,
Yuval Yeret (28:13):
yeah. I mean, if you look at the recent,
simplified big picture, it doesemphasize product innovation and
flow to feedback and some aspectthat you can tie more closely to
the product world. And Iwouldn't be surprised to see
(28:36):
that that trend continues tosave people. We can say a lot of
things about them, but they'reconnected to their market. They
understand what's valuable totheir customers, and they're
accelerating their feedbackloops as well. So yeah, I think
it's definitely gonna be part ofthe taxonomy of safe. I think a
(29:02):
more interesting question is,how much of the essence of safe
is gonna be reimagined to bemore product oriented. Are we
gonna see significant changes topi planning, yeah, and features
(29:23):
and what we actually manage inthe backlogs, in safe especially
in the art and team level, Ihope, I mean, I'm certainly
going to do My part to providesome more and more thinking and
(29:44):
guidance on what that lookslike. My customers are pulling
me to do that work. I havemultiple organizations right now
that you know are asking toreimagine what pi. Planning
looks like to be more outcomeoriented, more enabling us to be
(30:07):
more agile and more empoweredduring the PIs. So that's
definitely something I'll bespending time on. And
interestingly enough, it's alsovery similar to some of what
another type of organizationsare asking organizations that
(30:28):
are using OKRs to manage acompany or to manage more than
product development, they'realso struggling with quarterly
planning. They're also you know,feeling like they need to plan
too much up front, and theyspend too much time doing this,
(30:50):
and it doesn't leave them enoughflexibility to do the right
thing along the way, to reallyseek outcomes, even if those
outcomes are not productoutcomes to seek outcomes during
the quarter. So a lot of thingsare converging. It's, yeah, book
somewhere, the
Dave West (31:11):
probably is a book.
Well, there's going to be atleast a white paper, just
listeners. It's not out yet, soyou maybe listen to us before
it's out. But it's somethingthat Yuval and I were working on
yesterday and and it may end upwith a becoming a
product@scrum.org not that I'm,you know, so future, and we
can't make these predictions. Mylawyers hate that, but I think
(31:32):
it's very likely that this, thischallenge of managing a
portfolio, is something that ismanifest both in organizations
doing Scaled Agile, but doingless, doing whatever. I think
it's just a natural problem.
Yeah, even Nexus. Well, yes,even Nexus, which is good. So
(31:56):
the last question I've got,really, is, all right, for
people that are listening, thatare doing Scaled Agile, maybe
doing some professional Scrum,and they want to become more
product centric, what's the nextthing? What's the first thing?
The next thing? What should theydo next? I guess they should
probably
Yuval Yeret (32:15):
start to think about, what does it actually
mean for us to adopt a productoperating model. If what they're
looking at is portfolio level,product operating model or
applying product orientation tothe portfolio level, then they
(32:36):
can definitely take a look at anemail course I created called
portfolio agility trail map thatessentially talks about, you
know, some concrete, yet small,practical steps towards applying
product orientation at theportfolio level. And first of
(32:59):
all, why should you even care?
It's probably a good start. Theyshould look at, you know,
materials that we're releasingabout the Agile product
operating model and compare thatto what they're actually doing.
One of the things that that I'vedone with clients is crystallize
the product operating model to aset of principles that you need
(33:21):
to align to how you do that inyour context might vary, but
those principles are reallythings to to consider, and you
can apply them at the portfoliolevel. You can apply them at the
product level or even at theteam level, things like, are we
empowering our people to toactually make decisions along
(33:47):
the way? Are we steering usingevidence? Are we aligning to
what's strategic withoutmicromanaging those kind of
principles? They're not anythingnew. And to be honest, it's a
minimum. An organization that isimplementing safe, for example,
would do well to go back to thesafe principles and assess how
(34:09):
they're doing on thoseprinciples. The technique that I
really like is the echo cycle,and I learned it the phase first
time in you know, the advancedprofessional scrum master
workshop, which is like aliberating structure party, more
than anything else
Dave West (34:34):
we do, like our liberating structures, like
Yuval Yeret (34:37):
our liberating structures, but take Those
principles and put them on aneco cycle and see which of those
principles your you feel aremature in your organization,
which of those you still need todo some work on. Are there
principles that don't makesense? Maybe add the Agile
(34:57):
Manifesto principles along theway and. And you know, see how
you're doing. That's probablynot a bad way to start to think
about product orientationeither. The last thing I would
suggest is there is a lot of alot of overlap between what we
(35:20):
talk about in evidence basedmanagement and product discovery
and validation and the productoperating model. So if you're
interested in becoming moreproduct oriented, becoming more
evidence based, and treatingyour work more like product bets
and experiments and navigatingthe truth curve rather than just
(35:42):
building stuff is, you know,probably not a bad place to
start either. Yeah,
Dave West (35:48):
it was a really hard question, because it depends on
where people are at in their intheir journey. But I think
whatever happens, you know, thethe looking at your current work
to make sure it's more outcomecentric. Look at your the
principles that are driving thechange that you implemented,
(36:09):
save Scrum, whatever, and seeingwhere there is a disconnect
between that, whether it's atthe team level, the portfolio
level or the organization level,depending on who you are, I
think, is great wisdom andsomething that we we should all,
we should all learn from thanksfor your time. We try to keep
(36:30):
this short which is which iscompletely impossible on a topic
as interesting, as far rangingas this. So we've only really
gonna sort of like the surface,unfortunately. But thank you for
taking the time to share youryour perspective with our
listeners. Happy
Yuval Yeret (36:46):
to Dave, maybe one last thought is, as I was
thinking about the answer toyour to your question, I think
there's even a simpler answer,if your product owners are the
right people, and they'reempowered to do great product
(37:07):
ownership, you're probably welloff on the journey towards being
a product oriented organization.
The answer for most organizationwill be that that's not the
case, not necessarily becauseyou have the wrong people, but
because the ecosystem doesn'tenable them to be but what you
can do is you can take a look atthe misunderstood stances of
product ownership, the preferredstances, and assess where do we
(37:31):
stand on these things, and justtrying to make an incremental
improvement towards Some of thepreferred stances is probably
going to help you drive towardsa more product oriented
organization. We talkedyesterday about the product
ownership capabilities workshop.
(37:54):
That's an ideal setup foractually having these
conversations around, you know,are we set up around products?
Are we set up in a productoriented fashion? It's,
Dave West (38:09):
it's, it's really funny. You bring it back to
that, that workshop, becausepart of the reason why I started
writing about a palm agileproduct operating model was
because I was delivering thatworkshop, working with others on
that workshop, and finding thatit highlighted so many
dysfunctions in the organizationthat it required us to sort of
(38:31):
say, No, this is what good lookslike, and because the product
owner, as you rightly said, isthe intersection of the pain, of
the challenges of becoming, ofreally being a product owner in
an organization that's notthat's designed around projects.
So it's funny that it all goesback to that, because it's
(38:52):
almost comes full circle. Wow,cool. Well, thank thanks for
joining us. Thanks listeners.
Thanks for joining us today. Wewere with Yuval. Yuval yuette,
he's been on this podcast maybealmost as many times as me. It
feels like a PST and safe fellowtalking about how a palm the
Agile product, operating modeland Scaled Agile Framework safe
(39:13):
can live together, and hopefullyit's been useful. We We went on
a on a journey, talking aboutsome of the challenges, some of
the things that people maybemisinterpret around safe
implementations. And we talkedabout one thing that I just want
to remind everybody, you know,factories, let's be labs, not
(39:34):
factories, which is you may seeon a t shirt in the future.
Maybe it's a really good sort ofdescription of the change that
we're seeking in the productoperating model and building an
operating model to sustain thatkind of lab practice and fund
those labs appropriately with aportfolio planning approach and.
(39:57):
Um, I think super, superinteresting. So if that's one
takeaway, maybe that's thetakeaway you should you should
take and thank you listeners forlistening today to the scrum.org
community podcast. If you likedwhat you heard, please
subscribe, share with friends,and, of course, come back and
listen some more. I'm luckyenough to have a variety of
(40:18):
guests, yes, sometimes you veil,often Yuval, but other people as
well, talking about everythingin the air, professional Scrum,
product thinking, and of course,agile, thank you and Scrum on
you.
Dave, Hello, welcome to the scrum.org community
podcast. I'm your host. DaveWest, CEO, here@scrum.org and
today's podcast will focus onsafe and a palm or their long
titles, the Agile productoperating model and the Scaled
Agile Framework. Wow. Anyway, sotoday I'm joined by Yuval,
(00:36):
Yvette PST and safe fellow.
Welcome to the podcast, yourVal,
Yuval Yeret (00:41):
great to be back again. Dave, it's
Dave West (00:43):
it's great to have a safe fellow and somebody that's
heavily involved in theevolution of the Agile product
operating model on this podcast,because I got lots of questions.
And before we get to that,though, I want to tell our
listeners the genesis of this.
So this podcast actually cameout of a recent webinar,
navigate, navigating,navigating, navigating safe with
(01:06):
professional Scrum. Thosediscussions and questions got me
thinking about the relationshipbetween a palm and safe, and
that's the reason why I askedyou, Val to spend some time with
me today so I can pick his brainabout that. So hope you've, hope
you've got your thinking cap onyour Val. What is the
(01:30):
relationship? This was thequestion actually from the
webinar. What is therelationship between the Agile
product, operating model andScaled Agile Framework. Are they
friends? Are they rivals? Arethey best buddies? What is the
relationship? Can Can youdescribe it for our listeners?
Yeah,
Yuval Yeret (01:50):
the way I like to look at it, and it's inspired
what I'm trying to do in thetrenches these days is that
safe? Can be a way to implementor instantiate an agile product
operating model in anorganization so beyond the high
(02:13):
talk of being customer centricand having empowered product
teams and steering withevidence. And moving from
projects to products, you needto do something in the trenches.
You need to organize into thoseempowered product teams, and
sometimes teams of teams thatneed to work together, if your
(02:34):
architecture, you know, doesn'treally allow you to fully
decouple the organization. Somost organizations, as they're
trying to think about, how do weactually make significant steps
toward having an edge working inan agile product operating
model, they look at some sort ofagile approach. They could use
(02:59):
Scrum, if they're very small,they could use, you know,
different scaling frameworks.
Safe is the most popular scalingframework these days, so a lot
of organizations are using itfor this purpose. The other way
to think about it is, if youlook at how most organizations
(03:20):
have implemented agile untilnow, including using Save. A lot
of those organizations havecreated feature factories, or,
you know, I'm doing some work onthe portfolio level, so I call
it the mega factory. You mightcall it the giga factory, if
you're a fan of a certain EVbrand, fewer and fewer of those
(03:44):
these days. But those arefactories, while what we're
trying to create are labs. We'retrying to create an environment
where we're actually discoveringvalue and iterating towards
value and validating value andthe product operating model, and
especially the evidence basedaspect that, you know, we talk
(04:07):
about as part of a POM reallyhelps level up safe
implementations. I've used itmore than once in the trenches
to help organizations see whatwe're trying to really create
with safe beyond the mechanics,beyond the theater.
Dave West (04:29):
I mean, you said so much there, Yuval, and I want to
unpack it, I think, for ourlisteners. So I want to start
with the last thing that yousaid, which was to go from
factories to labs. Now thatsounds like, you know, a t shirt
rather than anything, but it isactually very profound, because
ultimately, most organizationswant the efficiency and the
(04:52):
structure of a factory, and mostimplementations of safe, I
think, echo that whereeverything goes through Lean
portfolio. Leo management teamsultimately are optimized around
the work, not around the value.
You know, you you see that theywant an efficient factory, but,
but, but unlike a factory, afactory works on a product
(05:15):
that's well defined with verylittle variability. That's what
Lean taught us right Six Sigma,those things, what we're talking
about, the product that we'reworking on isn't one of those.
Usually, it's more like what youwould be doing in a lab. You
have a hypothesis, you defineexperiments. You deliver them,
you try. You know, you and yes,they provide value. You know
(05:36):
being delivered. You know thepill helps you or whatever, but
ultimately, you observe thebehavior and the outcomes,
learn, and it refreshes likethat. But that's an incredibly
different philosophy than mostorganizations want their
technical capabilities ortechnology or digital
(05:57):
capabilities to be deliveredunder. So I think that's really
a profound difference. Do you dowhen you, when you say that you
know and and you know you're notprinting your T shirts, though
you really should, and that'sreally cool. That's, you know,
should definitely trademark it,but the or copyright it, maybe
because you can't trademark aphrase. But anyway, so when you
(06:21):
when you say that to theleaders, like the people you're
working with at the moment inChicago or wherever you're
getting off every week, what dothey say? Do they get it?
Yuval Yeret (06:34):
I haven't used that metaphor enough so far. I'm
working on using it more but,but they're getting it in
classic product developmentworlds. People are getting that.
You know, the feature factoriesdon't make sense the the
(06:57):
conversation at the but it'sreally important to take the
conversation from thetheoretical slow t shirt slogans
to what you actually do and likewe like we talk about in
evidence based management and inproduct discovery, shaping work
items, around bets, around anhypothesis, around an outcome,
(07:22):
and keeping what you actuallydeliver flexible. A lot of the
work that I do right now is onworking, let's say, with leaders
of portfolio and looking attheir Kanban boards, with all of
the initiatives on that Kanbanboard, and trying to discern
which of these initiatives aredescribing a body of work, what
(07:47):
we call output, or evenactivities, sometimes, and which
of them describe outputs thatare more what we would like to
see in a product environment,because those outcomes with
leading indicators of are weactually seeing traction or
evidence towards those outcomes?
Now let product teams figure outa way. Now we can give those
(08:11):
product teams a lab environmentwhere they're saying, This is
what we're trying to find. Let'stry different things to find the
right solution. Now, we'rereally in a new product
development environment, ratherthan, you know, a manufacturing
environment, a feature factory.
But that's
Dave West (08:31):
the key thing. So I think that's the thing that's so
interesting. You know, I have alittle bit of experience with
labs, from working with a feworganizations that do it. And
actually, my wife sold genetictests for a while, and I learned
(08:52):
a lot about genetic tests anddoctors, which was super
interesting. And sort of myexperience of labs is the
variability and the ability tochange. You know that there is
some level of efficiency in it,like they have set number of
processes. However, they arecontinuously monitoring those
(09:12):
processes to improve them.
Because ultimately, the theprocesses affect the outcomes,
and the outcomes affect theprocesses and blah, blah, blah.
So I think that's reallyinteresting, because one of my
challenges to say, for myobservation of how it's been
implemented, is they take it asthough they're not building a
lab, they're building a factory.
(09:35):
They take all the practices,they take every and they apply
it. I don't want to say Route,Route, Lee, you know, as per, as
per, the training classes, thematerials for, you know. And
there we go. And this is it. Andthat, I think, is a criticism
that I think is fair when it'sleveled against safe. By the
(09:57):
way, I know that safe itselfsays no. You shouldn't do that,
but, you know, it's hard.
Yuval Yeret (10:04):
Yeah, I think we have, I think there are three
loops of learning, ofimprovement that we need to
think about. Yeah, there's theactual manufacturing floor, the
actual product. And when we'rein the digital world. We don't
really need to manufacture thatproduct. It's there, yeah,
(10:25):
that's where a lot of you know,this metaphor breaks down. But
if we were making, I don't know,orange juice, like my my father
was, you know, as the headchemist for, you know, a factory
in Israel, or POM Granat juice,more recently, there's actually
(10:47):
making the juice. You want zerovariability in making the juice,
and you want to have very formalISO certified, whatever
production lines that you knowfrom time to time, you want to
be able to change. You want tobe able to improve the
production line, and you want toplay around with different
(11:09):
recipes for the juice that makeit more addictive, healthier,
whatever, whatever you're tryingto optimize for. That's new
product development. That'swhat's happening in the lab,
where people with the whitecoats are well, the production
floor is running in the lab. Youuse different processes. You
(11:32):
want faster feedback times.
You're okay with variability.
You're okay with today, we'lltry something, and there's a
good chance that it would notwork. Now there's a third level
that I think you're talkingabout, which is creating the
right lab operating system.
Yeah, and are we can we actuallyturn around faster in the lab?
(11:55):
Can we use new equipment thatmakes us more effective, more
efficient. Can we reduce waste?
Can we do more with the samepeople? Can we use AI to find,
you know, recipes out of the1000 possible or millions
possible recipes, which are theones we should start with, like
(12:15):
our friends in you know, thebiotech industry in the Boston
area are trying to leverage AIfor these things, yeah,
developing those capabilitiesand changing, you know, the
interactions between the peopleand the different steps in the
lab is also something that youwant to change. I think your
criticism for safe is about issafe itself dynamic enough that
(12:48):
it would allow you to changeyour lab as frequently as you'd
like? I think there's valid thatthat's valid criticism, both for
safe and for Scrum, thatsomething in the way we deploy
these approaches and theindustrial complex around them
(13:11):
has made it very hard for peopleto see that they can actually
use them as frameworks and notmethodologies, Even though both
are called frameworks, Scrum isa framework, and safe is a
framework. They both should bestarting points. They both
should be, you know, adapted foryour needs as an organization.
(13:32):
But it's hard for organizationsto realize that. It's much
easier to apply themconsistently across 1000s of
people that that's i Yes, that'sa thing for sure. I think if you
another interesting questionthat we might we could do some
(13:57):
thinking about, I've done somethinking about it is out of the
box, does safe as a framework,support an agile product,
operating model, or do you needto? Are there major
incompatibilities that we needto do something about? So can
it? So what I've seen is that itmostly can. Like there are,
(14:24):
there are some gaps. If you lookat safe portfolio level, it does
talk about outcome orientation.
It does talk about an epichypothesis. It does talk about
the MVP cycle. If you look atagile product development in
safe which is what you do at theedge of release train level. It
does talk about productmanagement and empowering
(14:45):
product owners, and, you know,having a benefit hypothesis for
the features that you choosethat allows you flexibility in
what are the stories that you'llactually choose to implement for
that? Feature, having said thatthe fact that you focus on
features rather than outcomes isan issue. So that's something
(15:07):
I'm working on. What might safelook like without features, or
what could replace or how, at aminimum, what I'm doing right
now is making sure that thefeatures, even though that's the
name of the entity, are mostlyoutcome oriented. That's the
minimum viable change, you know,without changing too much. And
(15:30):
of course, when people go intopi planning, you know, the
planning, increment quarterlyplanning, that's such a core
part of safe a lot of the time,what they plan is outputs, and
they go way too deep intoplanning outputs, for sometimes
a good reason, like the genesisof this is we want to have
(15:53):
enough understanding of thedependencies and what we will
need from each other to have arealistic plan to improve the
predictability of organizationsthat are often totally
unpredictable with very lowtrust from the rest of the
organization. So quarterlyplanning, the safe style,
(16:17):
improves that but needs to bereimagined for, you know, a
truly product orientedorganization, I can share that.
What I'm seeing in the trenchesis that a lot of times you talk
about product orientation, andyou want to aim towards that,
but your business stakeholders,the people that are going to
(16:40):
leverage those products theyfirst, you know, want to build
the trust that you have thecapability to deliver. You talk
to them about trust us, we areable to deliver those outcomes,
or tell us what outcomes youwant, not you know, what are the
projects that you really need?
And they're not at that level oftrust, to really empower you to
(17:06):
hunt those outcomes they wantfirst, to see that you can
actually deliver that's like achicken and egg problem that you
face when you're implementingproduct orientation.
Dave West (17:18):
I do want to, I mean, I see that all the time, that
ultimately the trust, whether itbe explicit or implicit, is kind
of missing, which requires thislevel of planning you're
describing. It requires youknow, the understanding of
dependencies, the understandingof critical path, which
ultimately makes it more likeworks being done at the team
(17:42):
level, less value is beingdelivered. But I just you talked
about income is safe incomplete,and you highlighted some areas
particularly not incomplete, butdoesn't sort of takes you in the
wrong. Maybe features takes youin the wrong direction. Maybe
the portfolio playing processcould be a little bit more
outcome centric and lessrigorous. You know, did it? Did
(18:05):
etc. There's also things missingfrom safe, you know, in terms
of, they don't talk aboutincentives, they don't really
talk about, well, to myknowledge, and obviously, you're
a safe fellow, Yuval, and youcan put me right here, but what
I am thinking increasingly isyou have to approach each
product holistically and buildan operating model that supports
(18:27):
that. So things like incentivesneed to be in place and aligned.
You need to ensure thatgovernance processes that aren't
the delivery processes or thedevelopment or the discovery
processes, governance issomething different need to be
well understood, you know, andappropriate measures put in
place. You need to think a lotabout organization structure,
(18:51):
and you know, how do you dothat? You know, particularly if
you're building cross functionalteams, you need to think of
that. Now, I know that there's,there's lots of case studies and
other materials that talk aboutthose things in the context of
safe but, but that sort ofholistic chain unit of change
approach, I think, is missingfrom what I've observed,
(19:13):
certainly from the way I've seenit implemented. Most people
implement it in their existingorganizations, with their
existing incentives, with theirexisting governance processes,
and then shoehorn it in, asopposed to making a I don't want
to say it is a significantchange to change to a product
operating model, but what's yourexperience? There? Am I wrong?
(19:36):
And I'm just, you know sort of
Yuval Yeret (19:38):
you're not wrong that most organizations are
implementing safe theater.
You're not wrong that. I mean,I'm not seeing that as very
different than the scrum theaterI'm seeing out there.
Dave West (19:52):
No, completely agree.
Don't say any different. Iwouldn't
Yuval Yeret (19:56):
the way I look at it, a lot of the questions and.
Aspects that you're talkingabout. Safe does have a
perspective on them. Safe doestalk about governance. It does
talk about the choices that youcan make around organizational
topology. Let's call it that it,you know, allows you flexibility
(20:16):
on organizational structure. AndI think that makes sense. It
talks about the dual operatingsystem, and the fact, yeah, in
order to create a productoriented organization, it
doesn't call it that, but ittalks about the value oriented
network. And organizing aroundvalue is a key part of of safe
(20:40):
moving away from traditionalfunding models and governance
models towards leaner, moreproduct oriented ones are part
of safe they just come with somuch other stuff that a lot of
organizations are missing. Youknow, the connection between
(21:02):
product orientation and what'sthere in save and it's also some
of the things that are harder toimplement than, you know, pi
planning, although aconversation with you know, a
lady at the big bank yesterdayreminds me how hard it is to get
(21:22):
people into a room, even avirtual one, and spending time
together. So let's put thataside. But there are harder
things about becoming a productoriented organization. Those are
typically also the harder thingsabout Scrum and the harder
things about safe. So I thinkwhat we need to acknowledge is
(21:45):
the dynamics in the market theyou know, there's a series of
organizations and the consultingecosystem around those
organizations that has tried toimplement Scrum, to help those
organizations become more agileand to make money along the way,
(22:07):
that got those organizationssomewhere and made those
consulting firms quite a bit ofMoney. Also, the certification
bodies have benefited as well,but that hasn't gotten
organizations to really be agilebecause they were afraid of
(22:28):
making some of those changes.
They you know, those are hardchanges. So there was another
round, the round of scalingagile safe, you know, was
brought in to do that otherorganizations use this Spotify
model or large scale Scrum, orscrum at scale. Everybody tried
to build the thing that will beused in, you know, in that, in
(22:52):
that more recent cycle. But eventhat didn't really get us the
results that we need. Becauseorganizations, again, we're
looking for a silver bullet, notto really reorganize around
value, not to really changetheir governance model, or to
break the silos between thebusiness and the product
(23:13):
organization. Some organizationsat that point, you know,
implemented a lot of prop orintroduced a lot of product
owners to their organization,but didn't really have a product
organization. I have P I haveorganizations which have, I'm
working with organizations thathave hundreds of product owners
but still don't have a chiefproduct officer for the
(23:34):
organization because theyhaven't really made that change?
Yes. And now there's the newthing, which is, okay, another
round. We can sell anotherconsulting gig, you know, to
these organizations. We can'tsell a scaled, agile gig
anymore. We can potentiallysell, you know, let's go product
(23:59):
oriented. At this point, I thinkthere's a lot of potential in
that. I want to be theoptimistic and, you know,
realize that change for thesemega organizations that have so
much history so many systems.
(24:21):
It's hard. It's just naturalthat it takes those
organizations time to implementthese changes. And you know, the
way, you know, we can managethat change that will take, I
don't know, a decade for anorganization to really transform
is, you know, to do it throughthree different cycles. One
(24:42):
cycle is the team level agile.
Another is the Agile led scaleand the you know now it's the
product, and maybe we'll needanother round, and that is okay.
What what we should try to avoidis for this new round of. This
product oriented, productoperating model to be just
(25:02):
another layer of veneer on topof the things we really do, if
on the other end, it does, youknow, get us one step further on
the journey a bit more outcomeoriented, a bit more empowered,
a bit more evidence orientedthan empiric, then I'm all for
(25:25):
you know this, this latest stagein the in the journey of
organizations, I'm all on board.
Yeah,
Dave West (25:35):
I'm more optimistic than pessimistic. You know, the
pessimist in me goes well. Wetried it with Scrum. We tried it
with scale. Now we're trying itwith product. It's all the same
old thing. It will fail. Theoptimist, which is more my
natural bias, believes thatactually, at team level, we did
some amazing things. Peopleactually deliver stuff. Now, you
(25:57):
know, done is maybe not 100%done, but it's pretty close,
better than it was testing isthat, you know, testing, there
are separate testingorganizations, maybe in the IV
and V area, independentverification and validation, but
at the team level, you wewouldn't we mix those
disciplines. Now, when I startedwork, testing was a whole
(26:19):
different department withdifferent people who were no fun
at parties, usually. And nowit's all more integrated,
integrating the fun, I guess, orwhatever. So, you know, and then
scaling has actually helped inplaces, you know. I think that
what you're talking about, youknow, pi planning, even though
(26:40):
it drives me mad that we, thatteams, that most of the work
that teams do come from piplanning, which drives me
insane. And that's something Iknow, you and I both agree on,
but it has actually unified andgiven a cadence and taken some
complexity out of out of thesituation. You know, some of the
(27:01):
the release train thing hasdefinitely helped, you know, in
terms of integrated releases,that when it, when you've got
1000s of people, or hundreds ofpeople working on 1000s of
systems, you know, there's thatwe definitely evolved. And I
think the product is, isdefinitely the next evolution on
that, which I am also optimisticthat will break down that divide
(27:24):
between business and technologywill simplify the alignment of
people to outcomes, willoptimize the sort of like the
focus of a lab rather thanfactory mentality, as you called
it. I'm very optimistic aboutthat. Do you though, do you
(27:46):
think that you talked abouttrying to make some changes to
the to safe with that regard? Doyou think that safe is going to
start taking more of the productmodel nomenclature up, you know?
Or do you, you know, the lastrelease was, from what I
understand, is all aboutsimplification, which was, which
is great and needed, and Iappreciate that work. But do you
(28:09):
think that that, that it, thatit will,
Yuval Yeret (28:13):
yeah. I mean, if you look at the recent,
simplified big picture, it doesemphasize product innovation and
flow to feedback and some aspectthat you can tie more closely to
the product world. And Iwouldn't be surprised to see
(28:36):
that that trend continues tosave people. We can say a lot of
things about them, but they'reconnected to their market. They
understand what's valuable totheir customers, and they're
accelerating their feedbackloops as well. So yeah, I think
it's definitely gonna be part ofthe taxonomy of safe. I think a
(29:02):
more interesting question is,how much of the essence of safe
is gonna be reimagined to bemore product oriented. Are we
gonna see significant changes topi planning, yeah, and features
(29:23):
and what we actually manage inthe backlogs, in safe especially
in the art and team level, Ihope, I mean, I'm certainly
going to do My part to providesome more and more thinking and
(29:44):
guidance on what that lookslike. My customers are pulling
me to do that work. I havemultiple organizations right now
that you know are asking toreimagine what pi. Planning
looks like to be more outcomeoriented, more enabling us to be
(30:07):
more agile and more empoweredduring the PIs. So that's
definitely something I'll bespending time on. And
interestingly enough, it's alsovery similar to some of what
another type of organizationsare asking organizations that
(30:28):
are using OKRs to manage acompany or to manage more than
product development, they'realso struggling with quarterly
planning. They're also you know,feeling like they need to plan
too much up front, and theyspend too much time doing this,
(30:50):
and it doesn't leave them enoughflexibility to do the right
thing along the way, to reallyseek outcomes, even if those
outcomes are not productoutcomes to seek outcomes during
the quarter. So a lot of thingsare converging. It's, yeah, book
somewhere, the
Dave West (31:11):
probably is a book.
Well, there's going to be atleast a white paper, just
listeners. It's not out yet, soyou maybe listen to us before
it's out. But it's somethingthat Yuval and I were working on
yesterday and and it may end upwith a becoming a
product@scrum.org not that I'm,you know, so future, and we
can't make these predictions. Mylawyers hate that, but I think
(31:32):
it's very likely that this, thischallenge of managing a
portfolio, is something that ismanifest both in organizations
doing Scaled Agile, but doingless, doing whatever. I think
it's just a natural problem.
Yeah, even Nexus. Well, yes,even Nexus, which is good. So
(31:56):
the last question I've got,really, is, all right, for
people that are listening, thatare doing Scaled Agile, maybe
doing some professional Scrum,and they want to become more
product centric, what's the nextthing? What's the first thing?
The next thing? What should theydo next? I guess they should
probably
Yuval Yeret (32:15):
start to think about, what does it actually
mean for us to adopt a productoperating model. If what they're
looking at is portfolio level,product operating model or
applying product orientation tothe portfolio level, then they
(32:36):
can definitely take a look at anemail course I created called
portfolio agility trail map thatessentially talks about, you
know, some concrete, yet small,practical steps towards applying
product orientation at theportfolio level. And first of
(32:59):
all, why should you even care?
It's probably a good start. Theyshould look at, you know,
materials that we're releasingabout the Agile product
operating model and compare thatto what they're actually doing.
One of the things that that I'vedone with clients is crystallize
the product operating model to aset of principles that you need
(33:21):
to align to how you do that inyour context might vary, but
those principles are reallythings to to consider, and you
can apply them at the portfoliolevel. You can apply them at the
product level or even at theteam level, things like, are we
empowering our people to toactually make decisions along
(33:47):
the way? Are we steering usingevidence? Are we aligning to
what's strategic withoutmicromanaging those kind of
principles? They're not anythingnew. And to be honest, it's a
minimum. An organization that isimplementing safe, for example,
would do well to go back to thesafe principles and assess how
(34:09):
they're doing on thoseprinciples. The technique that I
really like is the echo cycle,and I learned it the phase first
time in you know, the advancedprofessional scrum master
workshop, which is like aliberating structure party, more
than anything else
Dave West (34:34):
we do, like our liberating structures, like
Yuval Yeret (34:37):
our liberating structures, but take Those
principles and put them on aneco cycle and see which of those
principles your you feel aremature in your organization,
which of those you still need todo some work on. Are there
principles that don't makesense? Maybe add the Agile
(34:57):
Manifesto principles along theway and. And you know, see how
you're doing. That's probablynot a bad way to start to think
about product orientationeither. The last thing I would
suggest is there is a lot of alot of overlap between what we
(35:20):
talk about in evidence basedmanagement and product discovery
and validation and the productoperating model. So if you're
interested in becoming moreproduct oriented, becoming more
evidence based, and treatingyour work more like product bets
and experiments and navigatingthe truth curve rather than just
(35:42):
building stuff is, you know,probably not a bad place to
start either. Yeah,
Dave West (35:48):
it was a really hard question, because it depends on
where people are at in their intheir journey. But I think
whatever happens, you know, thethe looking at your current work
to make sure it's more outcomecentric. Look at your the
principles that are driving thechange that you implemented,
(36:09):
save Scrum, whatever, and seeingwhere there is a disconnect
between that, whether it's atthe team level, the portfolio
level or the organization level,depending on who you are, I
think, is great wisdom andsomething that we we should all,
we should all learn from thanksfor your time. We try to keep
(36:30):
this short which is which iscompletely impossible on a topic
as interesting, as far rangingas this. So we've only really
gonna sort of like the surface,unfortunately. But thank you for
taking the time to share youryour perspective with our
listeners. Happy
Yuval Yeret (36:46):
to Dave, maybe one last thought is, as I was
thinking about the answer toyour to your question, I think
there's even a simpler answer,if your product owners are the
right people, and they'reempowered to do great product
(37:07):
ownership, you're probably welloff on the journey towards being
a product oriented organization.
The answer for most organizationwill be that that's not the
case, not necessarily becauseyou have the wrong people, but
because the ecosystem doesn'tenable them to be but what you
can do is you can take a look atthe misunderstood stances of
product ownership, the preferredstances, and assess where do we
(37:31):
stand on these things, and justtrying to make an incremental
improvement towards Some of thepreferred stances is probably
going to help you drive towardsa more product oriented
organization. We talkedyesterday about the product
ownership capabilities workshop.
(37:54):
That's an ideal setup foractually having these
conversations around, you know,are we set up around products?
Are we set up in a productoriented fashion? It's,
Dave West (38:09):
it's, it's really funny. You bring it back to
that, that workshop, becausepart of the reason why I started
writing about a palm agileproduct operating model was
because I was delivering thatworkshop, working with others on
that workshop, and finding thatit highlighted so many
dysfunctions in the organizationthat it required us to sort of
(38:31):
say, No, this is what good lookslike, and because the product
owner, as you rightly said, isthe intersection of the pain, of
the challenges of becoming, ofreally being a product owner in
an organization that's notthat's designed around projects.
So it's funny that it all goesback to that, because it's
(38:52):
almost comes full circle. Wow,cool. Well, thank thanks for
joining us. Thanks listeners.
Thanks for joining us today. Wewere with Yuval. Yuval yuette,
he's been on this podcast maybealmost as many times as me. It
feels like a PST and safe fellowtalking about how a palm the
Agile product, operating modeland Scaled Agile Framework safe
(39:13):
can live together, and hopefullyit's been useful. We We went on
a on a journey, talking aboutsome of the challenges, some of
the things that people maybemisinterpret around safe
implementations. And we talkedabout one thing that I just want
to remind everybody, you know,factories, let's be labs, not
(39:34):
factories, which is you may seeon a t shirt in the future.
Maybe it's a really good sort ofdescription of the change that
we're seeking in the productoperating model and building an
operating model to sustain thatkind of lab practice and fund
those labs appropriately with aportfolio planning approach and.
(39:57):
Um, I think super, superinteresting. So if that's one
takeaway, maybe that's thetakeaway you should you should
take and thank you listeners forlistening today to the scrum.org
community podcast. If you likedwhat you heard, please
subscribe, share with friends,and, of course, come back and
listen some more. I'm luckyenough to have a variety of
(40:18):
guests, yes, sometimes you veil,often Yuval, but other people as
well, talking about everythingin the air, professional Scrum,
product thinking, and of course,agile, thank you and Scrum on
you.
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