Rethinking How Organizations Scale with AI

Thank you.

It's great to be back, David, to be talking about this topic that I think is on everyone's mind right now.

It really, really is.

But before we jump into it, just to weight everybody, I know you're excited about this.

Can we first just give a recap for our listeners about the book? Tell us sort of what the book is about, but keep it brief because you can always listen, obviously, to the first podcast.

Yeah, absolutely.

So with the project to product book, which I thank you for your help on that book as well, as well as with Output to Outcome, Dave, with all your critical and great feedback that I think made both books better.

But with that book, you know, I was focused on defining a product operating model.

So basically bringing some of these concepts of agility to, you know, they were always supposed to be part of the business, but really that never quite transpired the way we expected.

So connecting business and technology and value streams and organizational designs that really around long-lived product life cycles and innovation.

And of course, really with that whole generation of focus on developer productivity and value streams and flow, we were working in a world of constrained output, right? Prioritization of features is really important.

Management of roadmaps around scarce development resources and technology resources was really important.

And then around the end of 2022, all of that just blew up, right? All of a sudden we were staring at a future where outputs were becoming effectively free or the cost of tokens or electricity.

where coding was no longer the constraint.

And I realized as I was building my own agentic frameworks, working at that point in time as the chief technology officer at PlanView after the acquisition of TaskTop, that as we were building these things, we needed a whole new operating model because we were not constrained around what... we were building, really the outputs, the features that we were delivering, we were really more constrained about whether we were building the right things, whether we were delivering the right outcomes.

And so it made me realize that we needed a new operating model where some of the concepts that come from Lean and Agile and Scrum still very much apply, but they apply in this whole new world where we need to optimize not for what the next feature is, what the next roadmap item is, but whether we're delivering outcomes in this amplified world of abundant outputs.

And that's really the goal of the book, Output to Outcome.

It's an operating model for the age of AI.

And a way of adopting it, which I thought was particularly strong, which we don't often see.

So when we left the last podcast, we sort of finished it with, you know, we really need to talk more about leadership and the changes that are necessary.

Thank you.

It's great to be back, David, to be talking about this topic that I think is on everyone's mind right now.

It really, really is.

But before we jump into it, just to weight everybody, I know you're excited about this.

Can we first just give a recap for our listeners about the book? Tell us sort of what the book is about, but keep it brief because you can always listen, obviously, to the first podcast.

Yeah, absolutely.

So with the project to product book, which I thank you for your help on that book as well, as well as with Output to Outcome, Dave, with all your critical and great feedback that I think made both books better.

But with that book, you know, I was focused on defining a product operating model.

So basically bringing some of these concepts of agility to, you know, they were always supposed to be part of the business, but really that never quite transpired the way we expected.

So connecting business and technology and value streams and organizational designs that really around long-lived product life cycles and innovation.

And of course, really with that whole generation of focus on developer productivity and value streams and flow, we were working in a world of constrained output, right? Prioritization of features is really important.

Management of roadmaps around scarce development resources and technology resources was really important.

And then around the end of 2022, all of that just blew up, right? All of a sudden we were staring at a future where outputs were becoming effectively free or the cost of tokens or electricity.

where coding was no longer the constraint.

And I realized as I was building my own agentic frameworks, working at that point in time as the chief technology officer at PlanView after the acquisition of TaskTop, that as we were building these things, we needed a whole new operating model because we were not constrained around what... we were building, really the outputs, the features that we were delivering, we were really more constrained about whether we were building the right things, whether we were delivering the right outcomes.

And so it made me realize that we needed a new operating model where some of the concepts that come from Lean and Agile and Scrum still very much apply, but they apply in this whole new world where we need to optimize not for what the next feature is, what the next roadmap item is, but whether we're delivering outcomes in this amplified world of abundant outputs.

And that's really the goal of the book, Output to Outcome.

It's an operating model for the age of AI.

And a way of adopting it, which I thought was particularly strong, which we don't often see.

So when we left the last podcast, we sort of finished it with, you know, we really need to talk more about leadership and the changes that are necessary.