Arguing Agile: Product Management, Business Leadership, & Org Design

That thought leader you follow? A virtual assistant in Manila wrote those posts for $4-7 per hour. Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel trace the industrialized pipeline behind LinkedIn's 'thought leadership' industry; from Filipino Virtual Assistants feeding prompts to ChatGPT, to state actors using the same tactics (and sometime the same to...

Your boss asks what you need. You blank and say "nothing." You just turned down free money. Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel discuss and debate why that reflex costs you promotions, sponsorship, and credibility, and how to rewire it before your boss stops asking entirely. By the end, you'll have a five-line cheat sheet to pull from so you...

A PE bankruptcy specialist and BCG partner walk into a bar... Just kidding, they walked into HBR... and they're trying to sell you a framework! Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel dissect the April HBR piece arguing that "consensus decision-making doesn't work in the AI era." By the end, you'll spot the sales funnel dressed as thou...

The damage from your Q1 goal doesn't show up until Q3, on someone else's dashboard, after the person who flagged it got fired. Part 2 of the Outcome Trap series. Brian and Om argue why you can't see the trap from inside it: second-order effects land too late to trace, the people who spot trouble get removed, and the truth fractures across team dashboards until nobody owns the whole...

The thing everyone agrees is the right way to work has quietly produced some of the worst corporate ethics violations in modern history. Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel discuss and debate how outcome-based goals can and often do go catastrophically wrong - from Facebook to Wells Fargo - and introduce a stakeholder outcome mapping tool you can use immed...

Six companies, seven days, same playbook.  Welcome to the modern age where the excuses are interchangeable, the points don't matter, and ALL the strategies are not-so-secretly the same! Listen or watch as Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel talk through this month's round of layoffs and expose why Cloudflare's AI-first cuts and Fidelity&apos...

Is AI actually helping us escape the build trap, or just helping us build the wrong things faster? In this episode of Arguing Agile, hosts Brian Orlando and Om Patel discuss the new AI4Agile Practitioners Report 2026 from Scrum.org. The data reveals a startling trend: while 83% of practitioners have access to AI tools, the primary fear isn't job replacement, it's that AI is becoming a &q...

Is the State of Agile Report a clear-eyed snapshot of the industry - or a sales brochure?  In this episode of Arguing Agile, hosts Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel are joined by returning guest Ed Martin to dissect the 18th State of Agile Report from Digital.ai. Applying the economic theory of the 'Market for Lemons,' where asymmetric info...

Every PM is scrambling to learn AI tools - but is that a trap?  In this episode of Arguing Agile, hosts Brian Orlando and Om Patel summarize Shreyas Doshi's provocative article "Why Product Sense Is the Only Product Skill That Will Matter in the AI Age." Using the article as background for our discussion, we explore whether AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and NotebookLM are genuine su...

Stop burning time and money on agile theater! In this podcast, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel strip business agility back to its absolute basics: no buzzwords, no frameworks - just the organizational muscles you need to survive.  Listen or watch as we introduce and explain the five non-negotiable capabilities: Sensing and Responding (market feedba...

Businesses killed QA with bad org design, but with AI, is there potential for a near-term QA boom? Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel as we discuss the systematic elimination of QA roles over the past decade and discuss why that decision is now backfiring. That's right, with AI-generated code accelerating at breakneck speed and nobody to pro...

Meta and Amazon are cutting managers, but is it efficiency or chaos? Is de-layering, or flattening your org chart, good for a company, or is it a recipe for destruction? Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel as we wade into the murky pool that is the latest of corporate trends - "un-bossing" or the mass sacrifice of middle management and mid-le...

Stop building products nobody wants by discovering the psychological bias killing your strategy! Today, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel are taking on the "IKEA Effect." The IKEA effect is the cognitive bias that causes product managers and leaders to overvalue the things they build - simply because they built them! That's right, today we&...

AI product manager jobs are everywhere - but are they really different from regular PM roles?  In this episode of Arguing Agile, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel wade deep into the muck-filled pool of hype vs. reality around AI-specific product management roles. Listen or watch to join us as we do the dirty work of discovering if most AI PM job desc...

AI had little to no impact on productivity in the past 3 years. This was according to a National Bureau of Economic Research survey released in February 2006 of 6,000 CEOs and executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia.  Instead of throwing fruit at us, watch or listen as Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando discuss why it won't be the lo...

Is Amazon's famous leadership principle being weaponized against you?  Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel as we talk about how "disagree and commit" becomes "shut up and obey" in most companies.  Watch or listen as we discuss one of tech's most misunderstood management concepts, covering topics such as: Difference be...

Your boss's biggest career win might be setting them up for their biggest failure. 🚨 Listen or watch as hosts Brian Orlando and Om Patel tackle a phenomenon that's rampant in tech but rarely named: Expertise Overreach: when someone's success in one narrow domain inflates their confidence across every domain, with devastating consequences for teams, roadmaps, and the entire organiza...

AI agents failed spectacularly at teamwork, performing ~50% worse than one solo agent! This week, we're discussing Stanford’s CooperBench study (a benchmark, testing whether AI agents can collaborate on real coding tasks across Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust) and why AI-developer coordination collapses, even with a constant chat. Listen or watch as Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterpri...

Spotify never used the Spotify Model - and neither should you.  In this $2 billion episode, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel take a cutting torch to one of big-A-Agile's most beloved organizational myths - the Spotify Model! We're doing invasive surgery to see what's inside beyond the over-hyped squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds th...

Legacy systems work. So why do companies waste millions rewriting them?  In this episode of Arguing Agile, Product Manager Nisha Patel joins Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel for a debate on the dangerous obsession with rewriting legacy systems — from COBOL to green screens — that still power ATMs, government systems, and Fortune 500 billing engines....

Your meetings aren't boring because there are too many; they're boring because they lack drama, structure, and purpose! That's the claim made by Patrick Lencioni's book: Death by Meeting (2004)! Watch or listen as Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel use this book as a guide to discuss why most workplace meetings fail and how to tran...

Does getting promoted literally rewire your brain to lose empathy?  The science says YES. 🧠 In this research-backed episode of Arguing Agile, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel examine the unsettling neuroscience behind why your favorite coworker turned into a corporate tyrant after their last promotion.  Drawing from peer-reviewed studies in the Jou...

Is 'Move Fast & Break Things' just permission to be reckless? Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel as they examine Mark Zuckerberg's (in)famous mantra and reveal how it may have metastasized from breaking code to breaking laws, teams, and even contributing to real human harm. Watch or listen as we explore the critical dimensions...

Stop wasting time building the wrong thing faster! In this episode of Arguing Agile, Product Manager: Brian Orlando and Business Agility Coach to THE STARS: Om Patel respond to yet another listener question, discussing Product Risk Analysis in agile environments!  Listen or watch as they challenge the common misconception that analyzing risks upfront is "waterfall" and reveal why ignorin...

Is your solution architect a gatekeeper or an enabler?  Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel as they draw from their experiences to debate the reasons these roles - which should be natural partners - often find themselves at odds. It's a no-holds-barred look into the eternal conflict between product managers and solution architects! Watch or l...