Scaling AI: From Activity to Impact

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 organiz...

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 wo...

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 lea...

Yuval Yeret explores the evolution of AI adoption in organizations, from activity and output to impactful results. He discusses common pitfalls of AI theater, the importance of focusing on real impact, and strategies to leverage AI for organizational bottlenecks. 00:00 The Journey from AI Activity to Impact 03:59 Understanding AI Output and Its Limitations 07:24 Achieving AI Impact Across the Orga...

The new season of the podcast explores a question that's top of mind for many technology, product, and business leaders these days - How do you scale AI from Activity to Impact? What should your "ways of working" look like to enable you to build great products with AI? To use AI to become a 10x organization? Today's conversation is with a CTO who's working in the trenches to scale the impact of AI...

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 re...

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 u...

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: Wh...

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...

Why "Rules Written in Blood" Kill Agency—and How Stewardship Restores Flow When 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 fro...

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 i...

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...

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 processe...

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 busi...

In this last episode of the initial series, I share where we might go next in future episodes, exploring the product journey on the Scaling w/ Agility podcast. If you have any questions, ideas, or would like to come on the podcast to share your product transformation journey,  let me know ! Subscribe to the free audio mini course here: https://yuvalyeret.com/from-buzzwords-to-clarity-product-opera...

Let’s talk about how to integrate the Product Operating Model elements we discussed in previous episodes: * Recap of the “flipped pyramid” concept and its importance in POM * Key aspects of a true product-oriented, agile organization * The importance of treating the organizational setup itself as a product * Preview of future episodes I hope you’re finding this audio series useful. (If you landed...

Did episode 4 get you thinking about how to flip your product topology pyramid and move more work towards empowered product teams and groups? I hope so... The reality is that in a multi-product organization, it’s almost impossible to manage ALL the work in these teams. Some work will still require collaboration across product groups as well as strategic consideration by product and even business l...

Now that we’ve established our goal - creating empowered product teams- let’s discuss how to scale a product organization using these empowered product teams as a building block and connecting them without sacrificing agility and product orientation. In this episode: * Challenges of maintaining agility as organizations grow * Introduction to the “flipped pyramid” concept * Types of teams needed fo...

This episode of the audio series introduces a core pillar of the modern product organization - empowered product teams: * What does a truly empowered product team look like? * Contrast between ideal product professionals and reality in feature factories * Challenges faced by product people in feature factory environments * The struggle to build effective product capabilities in technology organiza...

Ok, so we hopefully established the potential of shifting from a feature factory towards a product-oriented organization. To start that shift, let’s explore why so many organizations are stuck in the feature factory (or even struggle to get to it...) In this episode, I explore one of the main villains in the product and agile landscape - the theater: * Introduction to the concept of “Agile Theater...

In this episode, we explore: * Why organizations need a Product Operating Model * Comparison of POM to traditional agile methodologies * Introduction to the concept of “feature factories” * Discussion on the continuum from activity to outputs to outcomes * The key characteristics of a Product Operating Model Reflection question: Can you identify the dynamics of the feature factory in your organiza...

Do you feel inspired by becoming an empowered product organization, but unsure of the concrete steps to take to initiate the transformation? I created the “Navigating the Product Operating Model Landscape” audio series to help product and technology leaders like you gain clarity on the path from a product/agile theater feature factory to becoming an empowered, outcome-oriented, and scalable produc...

“Show me your reviews, and I’ll tell you whether you’re a process theater, a feature factory, or a product lab.” In this solo episode, Yuval Yeret brings together his SAFe and Scrum expertise and his Sense and Respond Learning focus on Outcomes and Impact to explain how he helps product leaders use reviews to drive the shift from output checklists into outcome-focused conversations - the essence o...

In this special episode of No BS Scaling w/ Agility , Yuval shares an AI-generated highlight of the Breaking the SAFe video series created with Ryan Ripley. As a SAFe Fellow, SPCT, and Professional Scrum Trainer, Yuval brings a unique inside-out perspective—able to both defend and critique SAFe based on real-world intent and outcomes. This episode explores some of the most hotly debated elements o...

When is the right time to introduce portfolio-level agility? Drawing from more than a decade of experience guiding enterprise transformations, Yuval argues that starting at the portfolio level—early—isn’t just helpful, it’s essential. He walks listeners through a powerful case study involving a 1000-person delivery organization trapped in a waterfall-heavy, high-coordination setup. By introducing...