Yuval Yeret: Scaling AI from Activity to Impact

When nobody can predict the next five months, let alone five years, what does it mean for a leader to be agile? Brad Farris coaches owners and CEOs of professional services firms through what he calls a polycrisis: AI reshaping the work, shifting expectations between owners and the people who deliver it, and geopolitical shocks on top.

We talk about what agility looks like in practice for a managing partner, not a product team: admi...

AI can significantly compress enterprise software implementation timelines. That does not eliminate the constraint. It moves it.

Julie Hodge, AI Strategy & Operations Leader at Zuora, joins me to discuss how AI is changing professional services, customer onboarding, and the relationship between product and services. We use Zuora's Milo implementation agent and digital quote-to-cash twin as a concrete example, then follow the imp...

Consulting firms are telling engineering leaders that coding agents mean you can flatten the org, cut coordination layers, and move to autonomous tiny teams. But in the enterprise trenches, most teams aren't decoupled feature teams—they are system teams with heavy cross-team dependencies. 10x-ing code generation without fixing organizational coupling doesn't eliminate scaling overhead; it just floods downstream queues with un...

"We are now developers, not of the code. We are developers of the system."

Most AI coding rollouts end up with faster typing and the same delivery system. Shay Mandel's team at Ergo-Next Insurance went after the system instead. They broke the whole product development lifecycle into skills an agent runs — problem definition, PRD, engineering review, technical design, implementation, testing, code review — and to...

Most enterprise AI conversations get stuck on the wrong number: how many tokens an employee should be allowed to burn. Tomer Elias argues the cap is the least interesting question in the room. The hard part is attribution, knowing whether any of that spend moved a business metric at all. We compare notes on what enterprises are actually doing right now, why AI keeps exposing organizational problems that predate it, and what has to ...

In this special episode, host Yuval Yeret flips the script with guest Philip Morgan, an expert on positioning and point of view. They discuss the recent rebranding of the podcast and dive deep into the striking parallels between historical Agile Theater and the emerging risks of AI Theater. Discover why measuring raw activity—like tokens consumed or lines of code written—is a trap, and how organizations can shift toward...

Claude and Codex have a relatively new feature — `/goal` — that lets you set a completion condition and keep the AI running autonomously until it's met.

This capability exposes a real challenge with agentic AI and explains why its shifting the bottleneck to its assymetric capabilities in different stages and domains of value creation.

00:09 The new /goal capability — what it does and how it works

02:07 What the off...

AI coding assistants are genuinely good now — coding, debugging, tests, docs. But faster engineering output doesn't automatically become faster business impact. AI has quietly moved the bottleneck: from building working software to validating whether that software creates value for anyone who adopts it.

This episode uses flow thinking, cumulative flow, and the theory of constraints to help leaders see where AI speed is creatin...

Most AI programs start by measuring activity: licenses, prompts, token usage, and pilots. Some move on to output: more code, content, or analysis. Neither tells you whether the business moved.

In this solo episode, I explain the three levels of AI adoption: activity, output, and impact. The common trap is local productivity. One team can produce more while end-to-end delivery gets slower because the real constraint is somewhere else...

Zoetis is reducing a 26-day infrastructure workflow to 2-3 days with a three-agent pipeline. One agent designs, another produces infrastructure as code, and a third executes.

I talk with Kumar Venugopal, CTO of Zoetis, about moving from personal AI productivity to organization-wide impact. We cover the four levels of AI integration, the operating-model changes behind faster delivery, and why design thinking becomes more important as...

The question isn't how many product owners you need. It's how many genuine product problems your product actually has.

In the final episode of this three-part series, Yuval Yeret works through the most complex version of the product ownership question: what happens when a product has grown to multiple teams? The default answer — one team, one product owner — often creates titles without real ownership, especially when te...

Two titles, one product, and a gap in accountability that's quietly costing you more than you think.

In this solo episode, Yuval Yeret tackles one of the most common structural problems in product organizations: the split between product manager and product owner that creates ambiguity instead of clarity. Drawing on client patterns across hardware, software, and platform organizations, Yuval unpacks the misunderstanding at the root ...

In hardware-software companies, life sciences, and industrial tech, a familiar pattern emerges: a platform team serving multiple internal customers, one product owner caught between competing roadmaps, and no one with the standing to make the tough calls. In this episode, Yuval unpacks why this happens, what it costs, and what a more workable structure actually looks like.

What you'll hear:

• Why platform teams often end up without...

Most sales leaders are stuck running the machine. Few stop to ask whether the machine is even working.In this episode of In the Spotlight, Roi Carmel sits down with Yuval to break apart the two hats every revenue leader wears — operating the team and building it — and why most teams only do one.Yuval has spent over two decades helping organizations build self-improving teams, starting in product and engineering and now ...

Why "Rules Written in Blood" Kill Agency—and How Stewardship Restores FlowWhen companies scale, the default move is to add "boxes and rules" to maintain control. But this functional isolation often creates massive friction, turning G&A into a bottleneck instead of an accelerator. In this episode, Tyson Bertmaring and Michelle Holliday join Yuval to explore how shifting from rigid management to "Stewardship" allows your or...

In this conversation, Yuval and Andrey Knourenko discuss Aras Software's scaling journey. They reflect on the challenges faced during the transition, the impact of COVID-19, and the evolution of planning approaches and team structures. The discussion also touches on the influence of private equity on agile practices and the need for continuous improvement in agile methodologies, particularly in the context of emerging technologies ...

In this conversation, Yuval explores the intricate relationship between risk and value. He emphasizes the importance of understanding and managing risk to unlock potential value, particularly through de-risking strategies such as agile/iterative discovery-based execution.

"Agile is risk-driven development - You're surfing that risk."

00:00 The Correlation Between Value and Risk

04:12 De-risking Strategies in Product Development

10:46 ...

At some point on the growth journey, most leaders reach a point at which they upgrade their organization’s operating system. (even if they don’t explicitly call it that)

Way too often, this upgrade doesn’t result in immediate acceleration and traction. In many cases, it feels like the organization is working FOR the new structures and ways of working, rather than the other way around.

The processes often seem too ri...

Episode Overview

In this crossover episode with the Scrum.org Community Podcast, Yuval Yeret joins Scrum.org CEO Dave West to unpack why 95% of AI initiatives fail—not because of the tech, but because of outdated organizational operating systems. Together they explore how they’ve seen product thinking and empirical agility help leaders align strategy, product, and delivery to make AI deliver business impact. Together, th...