LeSS Newsletter - April 2025

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What is your “Product” Operating Model?

Analogy: Your Restaurant Experience

By way of analogy, imagine you come to a restaurant and willing to spend a lot of money on a bowl of an expensive and exotic soup. You sit at a table and wait for your dish to be delivered. When a waiter comes, you see that on his tray, there are raw ingredients that are used to prepare a soup, but there is no actual soup. You are puzzled. This is not what you are prepared to pay for. Each ingredient, although the required constituent of a final product, is not a product in itself. Even if a waiter, head chef and restaurant owner tried to explain to you that ingredients also cost money, and are [raw] products on their own, you still have a strong reason to be unhappy, as you were willing to pay your money for something that you could consume immediately upon delivery: a delicious, exotic soup. As a customer, if you do not receive what you paid for, you would be unhappy an, probably, ask for your money back, and not come to this restaurant ever again.

What Is Operating Model?

 What is an operating model? This is the term that companies use, to describe their internal ways of working. Essentially, instead of using a term that may suggest the adoption...

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New Videos: CafeTalk 2 & From Renting to Strategy

This month, two brand new insightful videos!

Episode 2 of the CafeTalks series is here: "Scrum and the flow in LeSS", where Bas Vodde and Bastiaan van Hamersveld explores the evolution of LeSS. Understand how LeSS adapts key events like planning, refinement, reviews, and retrospectives to support multi-team collaboration. Discover the importance of a single, shared product backlog for all teams and how it facilitates better decision-making. Learn how to consider the involvement of stakeholders and the role of management in a successful product development effort.

And "From Renting Resources to Driving Strategy - A Shift Toward Business-Oriented R&D" with Alexey Krivitsky and Mauro Sacchi. Where Mauro shares about how he is using Org Topologies as a mapping aid to chart and communicate the various stages of Wärtsilä’s LeSS adoption journey.

Click on either video below. Happy learning, enjoy!

AI-Supported Org Design

AI, of course, can be used to improve the performance of individual single-skilled specialists, and this is what we see as of 2025, but there is a large landscape. Let me share.

AI-Supported Org Design (“AI OD” for short) will be becoming a hugely impactful topic affecting all of us and all the organizations in which we work.

AI OD is the strategic practice of applying AI (agents and other upcoming innovations) to continuously inform, accelerate, and personalize how an organization is structured, how it evolves, and how its people learn.

It’s not about replacing managers or employees (!) —it’s about empowering us to design adaptable, resilient orgs with fewer structural overhauls and more intelligence baked into the day-to-day.

☝️ The core organizing principle: AI Makes Versatile Teams Viable.

☝️ The core operating principle: With Multi-Learning as the Engine.

How do these principles differ from applying AI to get individual performance gains? Let me unpack this slightly..

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The Agile Network - partnership

We have partnered with a new kid on the block The Agile Network, which is the #1 resource for Agile Professionals across the globe. Access cutting edge research, livestreams and more. with industry experts.

It is a great concept with monthly micro conferences, you can "ask the experts" questions and many informational videos. Obviously, LeSS is present on this platform as well. 

If you like to try it out, use the voucher LESSCOMPCMC33 for a 33% discount (valid unil 6/31/2025)