Explore our most useful insights from recent years. Each is an original article by Gil Broza, first shared in our free weekly newsletter, The 3P Vantage Point. Join its 4000+ readers.
Three of the dozen issues Gil discussed on a recent Product Fields podcast episode:
“AI amplifies habits, both good ones and bad ones.”
“Don’t abdicate thinking to the machine.”
“Your team members didn’t enter tech to babysit AI.”
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One of our clients is going all-in on AI, but not how most companies are doing it.READ MORE
AI has changed your team’s work, and the process needs to catch up. But how?READ MORE
When I talk with leaders about improving product development, the response is almost universal: not now.READ MORE
Do your roadmaps and project portfolios always contain more work than your teams can deliver in the allotted time?READ MORE
I’m raising a red flag.
(What you’re about to read apparently hit a nerve on LinkedIn, receiving 120,000 views, 1,376 likes and 73 reposts.)
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Do you use AI to write code? If you don’t also use test-driven development (TDD), you may be asking for trouble, even if it’s greenfield work or a quick prototype.READ MORE
“Team, we’ve prioritized the work. Here are the 10 items for the next release.”
Sounds good, right? But maybe not good enough.
Have you ever had trouble forecasting the completion date for a project or major deliverable?
Even if the team structure and process were appropriate, the workload was reasonable, everyone defined “completion” the same way, and there was a culture of honesty and transparency?
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If you’re working on your product roadmap, use these tips to make the roadmap useful.
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In your team, what’s the term for a unit of work?
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I recently facilitated three retrospectives where teams reflected on an entire year of working together.
Looking that far back, they noticed patterns, made connections, and uncovered issues that hadn’t come up in sprint retros.READ MORE
Do you need to deliver a lot by a fixed deadline?
Fixed deadlines and agility aren’t mutually exclusive.
Have you ever heard of a company that measures how many customers they lose because of their marketing efforts?
If you’re working on improving your product development processes, keep the following 10 matters in mind. These are some of the key points I wrote about in my book Deliver Better Results.
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Agile thought leaders used to say: “Eventually, Agile processes will become the norm, so we won’t even use the term anymore.” They were right, but they also missed something big.
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This pithy expression describes a key behaviour for leaders who want great results.
In too many companies, the opposite happens, and the consequences include:READ MORE
At a new client, POs and managers routinely over-commit sprints, make changes midway, and roll a bunch of work to the next sprint.
Sounds easy to fix, right?
Frequent product feedback is a central element of modern development processes. But there’s a wide gap between theory and reality.
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In 2004, I joined a software company as a back-end tech lead.
Early on, I was given an explicit boundary: don’t talk to the front-end team.
You’ve tried. Not once, not twice. But the stakeholders still need your product development org to deliver better results.
In early 2025, a company has asked me to help them leverage AI development tools in their Scrum process.
They wanted efficiency gains, but I was worried.READ MORE
On a recent flight, this message popped up on the screen in front of me:
“Your friend in seat 42H has invited you to watch the movie together”READ MORE
Listening to people in the Agile space, I’ve noticed that many use “courage” and “safety” interchangeably. Doing so may indicate a cultural problem that can impact performance.
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I recently wanted to submit a proposal for a conference talk. Here are three of the requirements; can you see what’s common to them?
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There can be quite a gap between the intended effect of product features and the actual impact on their users.
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Want your team members to increase their trust in you? Give them more feedback.
In fact, not giving enough feedback can erode trust. How so?
Working with other people involves far more than coordination, collaboration, and process. We constantly interpret tone, timing, silence, and intent. And that’s where a lot goes wrong.READ MORE
let’s talk about project lies, like these gems:
“I’m 90% done.”
“The status is green.”
“It will be ready by the promised date.”
“The new feature works fine.”
“Users are loving it!”
An enterprise Agile coach wrote to me just as my book Deliver Better Results came out: “Your book is timely.”
When I asked why she thought that, she answered: “The entire Agile community is struggling with how coaches, Scrum Masters, etc. define and deliver value.”
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This year (2023), I’ve seen a particularly high number of “Agile is dead” posts in my LinkedIn feed. This sentiment has been triggered and reinforced by mass layoffs of Agile roles. Here is my response.READ MORE
“Agile doesn’t work” pitfall #1: Organizations adopt practices, but practices are only effective when executed with the mindset (values, beliefs, and principles) that gave rise to them.
“Agile doesn’t work” pitfall #2: Rather than take the entire set, companies approach them piecemeal and therefore don’t achieve the potential.
“Agile doesn’t work” pitfall #3: The Agile approach is designed for the entire system of value delivery, but companies apply it mostly in the build part.
I often get this question: “My team works hard, but we struggle to achieve sprint goals and to finish as many stories/tasks as we’d like. What can we do?”READ MORE
You know what WIP limits are. But what do they apply to?READ MORE
Leaders know the importance of articulating the vision, mission, and goals and aligning everyone to them. There’s another important matter to determine and align to, but it’s sometimes missed.
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Your behaviours as a leader affect the level of psychological safety your team feels, and thereby the outcomes they achieve.READ MORE
You know that a team should be 5-9 people? Let’s poke holes in that jewel of accepted wisdom.READ MORE
Of all the strategies for increasing agility and efficiency, a particularly powerful one is to defer commitments.READ MORE
The use of metrics continues to be a touchy subject in the development space. Managers use them, coaches get nervous about their use, and team members are stuck in the middle.READ MORE
All too often in organizations, a team is not actually a team, but a workgroup. Even if it’s cross-functional, folks attend meetings together, and they work off a single plan.READ MORE
Your organization has an Agile way of working. Your previous company probably did too, but theirs was different. And the popular Agile frameworks? They don’t all agree either.
When I started in software development, projects went ahead with high certainty: we made big plans and then executed on them. That didn’t always turn out well.READ MORE
A CEO asked me: “I can see how the teams and the product lines will operate with an Agile mindset, but at my level, how do I manage differently? How do I work with the other executives?”
Here is my quick (“elevator pitch”) summary:
And… how would you tell? Here is a story from Gil.
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Almost every organization is now showing interest in Agile. We seem to have all the ingredients for effective transformations: well-known practices, detailed processes, ever-improving tools, extensive literature, myriad certifications, and many consultants. How is it, then, that so few organizations are truly agile?READ MORE
Try this sometime:
Survey your team members anonymously: “What’s the purpose of our daily standup?” (or daily Scrum, whatever you call it).
You might be surprised by the number of materially different answers you’ll get.
And then, you should be concerned over how many of those answers include words such as “updates” or “status.”
A few weeks ago I started helping out at one of the most Agile tech companies I’ve ever seen.
I looked into their current state. On the surface, they use a mix of Scrum and Kanban ideas that wouldn’t pass muster by the standards of either approach. Some practices are done loosely, while others are absent.
How does a group of managers truly become a management team, especially one that builds an Agile culture? READ MORE
At a technology company, the CEO called the VP Sales in and say, “I want Sales to be more like the tech team.”
Wait, what? Technology teams as the model of behavior?
Next time you attach a deadline to some work, check your assumptions.READ MORE
Modern development is predicated on strong teamwork, but too many teams get stuck in the “Storming” stage. READ MORE
How do you lead with both heart and mind? Why would you care do to that? And how do you overcome the organizational barriers to a people-first culture? Selena Delesie, host of the Lead With Love Virtual Conference, held a deep-dive interview on these matters with Gil in January 2017.READ MORE
Every Scrum team conducts a daily standup meeting. However, in its popular, canonical form, it hurts teamwork.
Being in the business of helping development teams and organizations become more effective, I get to see very diverse starting points. The clients of the last few months, however, had a lot in common.
If you could buy an insurance policy on your software development deliverables, would you?