LeSS Newsletter - June 2025
19/6/2025Hi 👋
In this June edition, some exciting updates!
The speakers 📣 and program is announced for the 10th LeSS Conference in Amsterdam in October!
You will also hear from Wolfgang Steffens about The Hidden Cost of High Performance and Ari Tikka on Build the culture of Trust, Care, and Love. Plus a couple of new videos by Jurgen de Smet and Bas Vodde 🍿.
Enjoy the read and hope to see you at LeSS2025 ! 🇳🇱
— Bastiaan van Hamersveld
CEO at less.works
The LeSS2025 Line-Up is Live!
🎉 Speakers Announced – and the Program is Live!
We’re thrilled to unveil this year’s speaker lineup and conference program.
Get ready for more than just inspiring talks – this is a deep dive into cutting-edge product development, bold organizational design, and yes… the transformative role of AI 😉.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the sessions:
- Mauro Sacchi - A Manager's Role in nurturing LeSS in traditional Industrial corporation
- Terry Yin - Human Centric SW Development Augmented by AI
- Martin Eder - Austrian post's journey of LeSS
- Steve Alexander - What if we could teach people about LeSS using a video game?
- Roland Flemm - Doing a LeSS Flip in 2 months
- Sofia Pelzl - LeSS (Huge) Adoptions: how to start with a transformation?
- Maarten Dalmijn - The 5 Obstacles to High Performing Teams
- Saloni Seth-Watkins - LeSS & DEI: What happens when we stop looking?
Build the culture of Trust, Care, and Love
Five significant patterns that are essential for group dynamics in teams. They happen all the time and have an essential function in the beginning. Skillfully facilitating them, again and again, will gradually develop a culture of Trust, Care, and Love for the shared mental and physical space.
Our instinctive traits for working in smallish, co-located teams have evolved over thousands of years. The same human needs, behavior, and potential exist in remote teams and larger organizations but are invisible. Understanding them is essential for good leadership.
However, even co-located teams struggle in the workplace. The researchers Richard Hackman and Susan Wheelan, as well as popular writers Katzenbach and Patrick Lencioni, who actually studied teams, all open their books by stating that good Teamwork is rare....
continue reading on less.works →
New Videos: CafeTalk 3 & Estimation Matrix
Two brand new insightful videos this month!
Episode 3 of the CafeTalks series is here: "The lust for team Product Owner will kill your Product!", where Bas Vodde and Bastiaan van Hamersveld explores Think your product ownership model is safe? Think again. Bas Vodde dives deep into the controversial truth about the Team Product Owner role and why it’s not just a bad idea—it’s a product killer. Discover the hidden pitfalls of this common practice, how it derails teams, and why sticking with the status quo might be the worst decision for your organization.
And "Stop using Planning Poker, Start using an Estimation Matrix", where Jurgen de Smet shares why many cognitive biases are entering the field of estimation that lead to systematic errors of judgment and how we can fix bad estimations and forecasting.
Click on either video below. Happy learning, enjoy!
The Hidden Cost of High Performance
“Changing parts will have little impact on the system. But changing interactions or purpose can create a massive impact.” — Steven Schuster
Systems thinkers have long understood this. So why do many organizations still obsess over optimizing individual teams — driving up local efficiency while system-wide performance stagnates or declines?
Here’s what happens:
- A team gets faster
- But what they produce isn’t aligned with what the customer actually needs
- Or worse, it clashes with what another team is doing
- You get work that’s faster, cheaper… and irrelevant
To improve real outcomes, stop focusing on parts. Start improving how the parts work together. Make collaboration worth it for individuals — not an extra burden, but a source of progress and shared wins...
continue reading on less.works →
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.
