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Agile Strategy

Align vision and execution to foster adaptability and deliver ongoing value through strategic insights and evidence-based practices.

Drive long-term success with Agile Strategy. Align vision, execution, and adaptability to deliver continuous value.

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Overview

Agile Strategy is a comprehensive approach that aligns an organisation’s vision with its execution and adaptability, ensuring that teams can deliver value consistently and sustainably. It transcends individual practices or frameworks, focusing instead on the systemic integration of agile principles across the organisation. This strategy emphasises the importance of creating an environment where teams can respond to change, innovate continuously, and maintain a clear focus on customer needs.

By fostering a culture of collaboration and transparency, Agile Strategy enables organisations to break down silos and enhance cross-functional teamwork. It encourages the use of metrics and feedback loops to inform decision-making, allowing teams to adjust their approaches based on real-time data. This adaptability is crucial in today’s fast-paced market, where the ability to pivot quickly can determine success.

Moreover, Agile Strategy is not merely about implementing agile practices; it is about embedding agility into the organisational DNA. This long-term perspective ensures that agility is not a one-off initiative but a sustained capability that drives ongoing improvement and value delivery. By prioritising alignment between strategic goals and operational execution, organisations can navigate complexity and uncertainty more effectively, ultimately leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and business resilience.

Learn More about Agile Strategy

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Common Goals

Common Goals are a first principle of effective delivery. They align strategy with execution, enabling every decision, every Sprint, and every line of code to serve a shared purpose. Without them, you don’t have a system—you have disconnected activity.
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Agile Product Operating Model

Transform your organisation with the Agile Product Operating Model, blending agile practices and product management to deliver consistent, customer-focused value.
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Open Space Agile

Open Space Agile is an approach to organisational agility that applies the principles of Open Space Technology—a self-organising, agenda-free format for large group collaboration—to Agile transformation. Popularised by Daniel Mezick and others in the Open Leadership Network, Open Space Agile invites everyone in the organisation to co-create the change process, fostering psychological safety, shared ownership, and authentic engagement. Rather than relying on top-down rollout plans, it embraces emergence, letting those closest to the work define priorities and actions through open, iterative dialogue. This approach aligns with complexity thinking and honours the Agile ethos by enabling transformation to unfold organically, adaptively, and in response to real needs.
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    Beta Codex

    Embrace Beta Codex for decentralised, adaptive, and human-centric organisational design. Enable true agility beyond rigid hierarchies.
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    Evidence Based Management

    Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a strategy for improving an organisation’s ability to deliver value by making decisions based on evidence, not opinion. It enables data-informed investment in agility, innovation, and outcomes rather than output.
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    Scaling

    Coordinate multiple teams to deliver complex products while preserving agility. Focus on alignment, flow, and value delivery across the enterprise using lean principles and adaptive product structures.
    Blog

    Your Evolving Definition of Done

    Explains how the Definition of Done evolves in Scrum, aligning team practices with organisational standards to ensure consistent quality, compliance, and business value delivery.
    Videos

    Is Your Project Ecosystem Truly Agile?

    Explains why true agility requires end-to-end automation and short feedback loops, not just Agile teams, to maximise value and efficiency for stakeholders in project delivery.
    Videos

    Empowering Teams to Tailor Their Processes: A Path to True Agility

    Explains why empowering teams to adapt their processes boosts agility, reduces waste, and fosters innovation, using real-world examples and practical steps for organisations.
    Videos

    The Importance of Delivering Working Software Every Iteration

    Explains why delivering working software to users every iteration is vital in Agile, highlighting feedback, value, and practical steps for continuous improvement and success.
    Guides

    The Evidence-Based Management Guide Improving Value Delivery under Conditions of Uncertainty

    Discover more about The Evidence-Based Management Guide
    Videos

    Detecting Agile BS: Lessons from the US Department of Defense

    Learn how to spot fake Agile practices using six key questions from the US Department of Defense, and discover steps to assess and improve true Agile maturity in organisations.
    Blog

    The Role of Agency in Scrum: Why Self-Management Without Agency is a Lie

    Explains why true Scrum requires real team agency, not just self-management in name, and how lacking agency leads to ineffective, ritualistic Agile practices.
    Videos

    7 Deadly Sins of Agile: Greed

    Explores how greed in Agile leads to overwork and reduced value, offering strategies for value-driven delivery, balanced sprints, team trust, and effective leadership.
    Videos

    Does Your Team Truly Understand Your Product Vision and Goals?

    Ensuring every team member understands and connects their daily work to the product vision and strategic goals is key to true Agile alignment, collaboration, and value delivery.
    Videos

    How Do You Know How Long It Takes to Deliver Value?

    Explains how Agile teams can measure and improve Time to Market using key metrics like lead time, cycle time, and time to fix to deliver value to customers faster.
    Videos

    Biggest contribution from a Product Owner that you know of

    Explores how visionary Product Owners at Microsoft drove Agile transformation, shortened feedback cycles, and reshaped product development culture and industry standards.
    Videos

    How to Achieve Predictability in Business through Agile Principles

    Learn how Agile principles help businesses improve predictability by addressing challenges, optimising systems, aligning goals, and adapting to change for consistent results.
    Videos

    Bridging the Gap: How to Align Your Organisation for Successful Agile Product Management

    Learn how to align teams, stakeholders, and processes for effective agile product management by fostering shared goals, clear communication, and evidence-based practices.
    Videos

    Agile Leadership: Empowering Managers with the Right Skills

    Explores how agile leadership and evidence-based management training help managers develop servant leadership skills, delegate effectively, and make data-driven decisions.
    Videos

    How Immersive Learning Transforms Aspiring Agile Leaders

    Immersive learning helps aspiring agile leaders overcome cultural barriers by providing time, practical experiments, and peer feedback to drive real organisational change.
    Videos

    Empowering Agile Teams: Why Understanding Product Vision is Key to Success

    Explains why agile teams need a clear understanding of product vision and strategic goals to boost alignment, ownership, decision-making, and adaptability.
    Videos

    7 Harbingers of the Agile apocalypse - Chaos

    Explores how chaos arises in agile transformations due to unclear vision and poor communication, and offers strategies for restoring alignment, clarity, and effective teamwork.
    Videos

    Transforming Scope Creep into Success: Embrace Agility and Deliver Value in a Changing Market

    Learn how to turn scope creep into an advantage by adopting Agile methods, focusing on value delivery, and adapting to changing requirements in dynamic markets.
    Videos

    Are Your Teams Empowered to Change Requirements Based on User Feedback? If Not, You’re Probably Not Very Agile

    Empowering teams to adapt requirements based on user feedback is key to true agility. Learn why backlog updates and team engagement drive better, user-focused products.
    Blog

    Product Goal is an Intermediate Strategic Goal

    Explains how product goals serve as intermediate strategic goals, guiding agile organisations through uncertainty using experimentation, outcomes, and data-driven discovery.
    Videos

    Evidence-Based Management: The Key to Agile Success

    Evidence-based management uses data-driven decisions to help organisations achieve business outcomes, adapt to market changes, and maximise value beyond agile processes.
    Videos

    What more needs to happen before traditional organisations consider Agile?

    Explores what traditional organisations must change—beyond adopting Agile tools—to achieve true agility, cultural transformation, and sustained competitive advantage.
    Videos

    The Fallacy of Equating Agility with Speed: What Agile Really Means

    Explains why Agile is not about speed but about prioritising valuable work, adapting to feedback, and avoiding wasted effort to deliver products that truly meet user needs.
    Videos

    7 Harbingers of the Agile apocalypse - Organizational Structure

    Explores how rigid, hierarchical structures hinder organisational agility and offers practical strategies for shifting to decentralised, empowered, agile teams.
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    Company as a Product

    Company as a Product (CaaP) is an organisational strategy that treats the entire company as a continuously evolving product, rather than a static structure. It emphasises designing and refining the organisation based on customer feedback, measurable outcomes, and strategic goals—much like product development. Popularised by thought leaders in modern organisational design and continuous discovery, CaaP encourages cross-functional collaboration, experimentation, and alignment across all levels. Instead of optimising for internal efficiency or hierarchy, it focuses on delivering value to customers and adapting the company’s capabilities, systems, and structures as intentionally as one would iterate on a product.
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      Value Stream Management

      A strategic approach to improving the flow of value through an organisation, optimising efficiency, reducing waste, and aligning work with customer outcomes.
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      Agnostic Agile

      Agnostic Agile is a movement that promotes ethical, context-driven agility by prioritising principles over rigid frameworks. Championed by thought leaders like Arie van Bennekum, a Dutch signatory of the Agile Manifesto, it encourages practitioners to adapt methods pragmatically based on need rather than ideology. Drawing from diverse approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and XP, Agnostic Agile emphasises professionalism, critical thinking, and value delivery over brand loyalty or prescriptive practice.
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      Portfolio Management

      Align strategy with execution through Portfolio Management. Prioritise investments, optimise value streams, and drive organisational agility.
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      Agentic Agility

      Agentic Agility is the ability for humans and AI to take intentional, adaptive action within socio-technical environments, enabling continuous improvement, value delivery, and organisational resilience. It transforms Agile, Scrum, and DevOps from passive execution into deliberate evolution, ensuring agility remains a living capability, not a hollow label.
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      Forecasting

      Enhance forecasting in Agile and Scrum. Use empirical data to predict delivery timelines, manage risk, and optimise value delivery.
      Blog

      Why Handoffs Are Killing Your Agility

      Excessive handoffs in software development create delays, reduce quality, and harm team morale. Learn how eliminating handoffs boosts agility, flow, and value delivery.
      Videos

      Where Agile Went Wrong: Understanding the Competence Crisis

      Explores how early assumptions about competence led to Agile’s current skills gap, highlighting the need for continuous learning, better hiring, and deeper expertise in teams.
      Videos

      Special Sprints: Agile Banditry or Risk Management?

      Explores why special sprints like Sprint Zero or hardening sprints undermine Agile by delaying work, increasing risk, and reducing continuous delivery of usable products.
      Videos

      Detecting Agile BS: Lessons from the Department of Defense

      Explores why true organisational agility needs more than Agile development, highlighting the importance of continuous delivery, quality, and removing bureaucratic barriers.
      Blog

      There is no "do agile" there is only "be agile"

      Discover why true agility is about being, not just doing. Embrace deep organizational change for lasting value in your agile journey. Learn more!
      Blog

      Evolution not Transformation: This is the Inevitability of change

      Change in organisations is a continuous, evolutionary process driven by experimentation and adaptation, not a one-time transformation or fixed end state.
      Videos

      Addressing Systemic Issues in Agile Organizations

      Explores why Agile fails without addressing systemic issues, highlighting the need for organisational change, meaningful metrics, and the courage to make bold improvements.
      Videos

      Why Is It So Important that Senior Leadership Teams are Engaged During an Agile Consulting Engagement?

      Active senior leadership engagement is essential for successful Agile transformation, enabling systemic change, faster adaptation, and organisation-wide alignment.
      Videos

      Why is Satya Nadella a better example of agile leadership than Steve Jobs?

      Compares Satya Nadella’s and Steve Jobs’s leadership, highlighting Nadella’s agile approach that fosters innovation, decentralised decision-making, and lasting organisational change.
      Videos

      Say-Do Metrics: Avoiding Agile Banditry in Your Organization

      Explains the risks of using say-do metrics in Agile, highlighting how they encourage vanity metrics, harm psychological safety, and shift focus from outcomes to outputs.
      Videos

      Navigating Complexity: Why Agile Practices Are Essential for Modern Product Development

      Explains how agile practices help teams manage complexity, adapt to change, and deliver value faster in modern product development, compared to traditional methods.
      Videos

      Why are recessions a great time for organizations to evaluate the opportunity of agile?

      Explains why recessions are ideal for organisations to adopt agile, highlighting adaptability, rapid learning, and customer-focused growth in uncertain times.
      Videos

      Unlocking Agile Leadership: Transform Your Skills with Scrum.org's Essentials Workshop

      Learn practical agile leadership skills, foster team alignment, and drive cultural change with Scrum.org’s workshop to support agile transformation and organisational success.
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      Navigating Agile Transformation: Empowering Teams for Success in a Rapidly Changing Landscape

      Explores effective Agile transformation by empowering teams, improving collaboration, focusing on value delivery, and fostering continuous improvement in fast-changing environments.
      Videos

      Taming the Chaos: How to Align Your Agile Team for Success

      Learn how to reduce chaos in Agile teams by improving alignment, setting clear goals, fostering open communication, and using visual tools for better collaboration and efficiency.
      Videos

      7 Harbingers of the Agile apocalypse - Silence

      Explores how silence in agile teams signals disengagement, and offers strategies to boost stakeholder participation, open communication, and effective sprint reviews.
      Videos

      Redefining Agile’s Core: Beyond Rituals and Procedures

      Explores how Agile’s true value lies in delivering outcomes and adapting to change, not just following rituals or procedures, and highlights the need for human judgement in complex systems.
      Videos

      Ditch the Agile Bandit Mentality: How to Prioritise Value Over Estimates for Team Success

      Explores why focusing on value delivery and psychological safety leads to better Agile team outcomes than fixating on estimates, output metrics, or blame culture.
      Videos

      The Importance of Patience and Trust in Building Agile Organizations

      Explores how patience and trust foster effective Agile teams, support learning from failure, prevent blame culture, and enable innovation through empiricism and collaboration.
      Videos

      Taming the Chaos Factor: How to Align Your Agile Teams for Success

      Explores common causes of chaos in Agile teams and offers practical strategies to improve alignment, communication, and collaboration for better team performance.
      Videos

      How would you help organizations pitch the opportunity of agile internally?

      Learn how to build a compelling business case for agile adoption by aligning benefits with key metrics, stakeholder goals, and inclusive change management strategies.
      Videos

      The Importance of Evidence-Based Management in Agile Environments

      Explains how evidence-based management helps Agile teams use data and key metrics to measure progress, make informed decisions, and drive continuous improvement.
      Videos

      The Strategic Imperative: Empowering Teams with Vision, Goals, and Direction

      Explores how clear vision, goals, and evidence-based management empower teams, improve alignment, and foster autonomy, engagement, and effective decision-making in organisations.
      Videos

      Product Ownership vs. Product Management: Busting the Myth That They're Separate Roles

      Explains why product ownership and product management are deeply connected in Scrum, clarifying their roles, focus on value delivery, and the need for agile adaptation.
      Videos

      Empowering Agile Teams: The Critical Role of User Feedback in Requirement Changes

      Explains how empowering Agile teams to act on user feedback enables rapid requirement changes, improves product relevance, and overcomes barriers like rigid contracts.
      Videos

      Unlocking Agile’s Core: Questioning to Create Value

      Explores how questioning, continuous improvement, and team empowerment drive Agile success, helping organisations adapt quickly, spot inefficiencies, and create lasting value.
      Videos

      Why did so many of the early agile transformations fail?

      Early agile transformations often failed due to top-down decisions, lack of team involvement, and misalignment between leadership and those doing the work.
      Videos

      What would be an example of a great agile consulting outcome for a client?

      A great agile consulting outcome enables organisations to adapt quickly to change, fostering resilience, decentralised decision-making, and empowered, responsive teams.
      Videos

      The Evolution of Product Management in the Agile Era

      Explores how Agile transformed product management by enabling shorter release cycles, faster feedback, continuous delivery, and a stronger focus on built-in quality.
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      Current Value

      Current Value is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management. Rather than being a single measure, it comprises a group of indicators that collectively assess the tangible, real‑time value a product or service delivers. This group of measures includes, for example, customer satisfaction data, revenue impact, and performance feedback—all of which help determine how much value is being realized at present.
      Videos

      Rethinking Budgeting: How to Break Free from Traditional Constraints and Maximise Value

      Explores the limitations of traditional budgeting and explains how flexible, value-driven approaches like Beyond Budgeting can improve agility, innovation, and resource use.
      Videos

      Turning User Feedback into Actionable Work: A Guide to Maximizing Product Value

      Learn how to quickly turn user feedback into actionable work items in Agile teams, improving product value through fast feedback loops, prioritisation, and continuous improvement.
      Videos

      How to Overcome Agile Banditry: A Product Owner’s Journey

      Explains the pitfalls of micromanagement in Agile, showing Product Owners how to avoid “Agile Banditry” by focusing on vision, value, and empowering their teams.
      Videos

      Vision, Value, and Validation: The Keys to Successful Product Management

      Explains how Product Owners can replace traditional project management with vision, value, and validation to guide teams, deliver real value, and ensure product success.
      Blog

      The Urgent Call for Agile Organisational Transformation

      Explores why traditional hierarchical organisations struggle in fast-changing markets and argues for agile, decentralised structures to boost adaptability and innovation.
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      Unrealised Value

      Unrealized Value is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management and represents a group of measures focused on the potential value that could be captured with further improvements. Instead of being a single metric, it includes various indicators that assess untapped opportunities, such as latent market demand or areas for innovation. These combined measures offer insight into how much additional value remains available for the organization.
      Videos

      Transform Your Scrum Team in 90 Days: Strategies for Continuous Delivery and Empowerment

      Learn practical steps to help Scrum teams achieve continuous delivery, clarify business value, integrate feedback, and build empowerment within 90 days for lasting agility.
      Course

      Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM)

      Scrum.org created the Evidence-Based Management™ (EBM) framework which is an Agile approach to help leaders guide their teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organizational capabilities, and business results. EBM focuses on customer value and intentional experimentation to systematically improve an organization’s performance and achieve its strategic goals.
      Videos

      Conquering Sloth in Agile: 6 Signs Your Team Might Be Stalling

      Learn to spot six key signs of sloth in Agile teams, including missed deliveries, ignored feedback, rigid processes, and lack of adaptation, to improve true agility.
      Course

      Professional Agile Leadership Essentials (PAL-e) with Certification

      Professional Agile Leadership (PAL) Essentials is a 14h workshop, delivered over four half-days that provides a foundation of the role that leaders play in creating the conditions for a successful agile transformation.
      Videos

      Why Agile Success Relies on Effective Planning: Debunking the Myths of Scrum

      Explains why effective planning is essential in Agile and Scrum, debunking myths about planning, and highlights strategies for teams of all sizes to achieve project success.
      Videos

      Unlocking Organisational Agility: How to Empower Your Team for Rapid Market Response

      Learn how empowering teams, streamlining communication, and providing context enable organisations to respond rapidly to market changes and gain a competitive edge.
      Videos

      Unlocking Organisational Value: The Transformative Power of Engagement in Agile Teams

      Explores how decentralising decision-making, fostering autonomy, and building a shared vision in agile teams can boost engagement and unlock greater organisational value.
      Videos

      Unlocking Agile Consulting: Transform Your Organisation with Diverse Strategies and Continuous Learning

      Explains Agile consulting by highlighting diverse strategies, continuous learning, and practical ways to help organisations improve collaboration, value delivery, and adaptability.
      Videos

      Scaling Smart: How to Build Sustainable Growth Without the Chaos

      Learn how to achieve sustainable, resilient organisational growth by focusing on simplification, value delivery, and effective agile practices—avoiding chaos as you scale.
      Videos

      Unlocking Unrealised Value: The Key to Elevating Your Product Development Strategy

      Explains how identifying and validating unrealised value, understanding user needs, and rapid feedback loops can enhance product development and maximise user impact.
      Course

      Professional Scrum Product Owner

      Our Professional Scrum Product Owner course helps students master the Product Owner role with real-world scenarios and practical exercises, enabling participants to drive product success using Agile principles and Scrum.
      Videos

      Cutting Through the Red Tape: How Eliminating Committees Can Boost Your Time to Market

      Explores how committees can delay decision-making, reduce agility, and increase time to market, highlighting the benefits of empowering teams and streamlining processes.

      Connect with Martin Hinshelwood

      If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.

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