LeSS Newsletter - November/December 2025
December 9, 2025Hi 👋
December always invites a pause: a moment to look back at what we’ve learned and how we’ve grown as a community. I’m excited to share this month’s highlights that continue our shared journey of simplifying organisations and demystifying product development.
What’s inside this month?
- 🎯 Just launched: Certified LeSS Coach
- 📖 A LeSS Story: Episode 1 "Sprint Planning in LeSS" by Robert Briese
- 🛑 Stop Building Fake Platforms! by Jurgen de Smet
- 🍿 "Foundations for Thinking and Practice" video with Bas Vodde
- 📚 LeSSons in the picture: LeSS in Action
Enjoy, and keep learning! For all who celebrate🎄 enjoy the holiday season!
— Bastiaan van Hamersveld
CEO at less.works
email: bastiaan@less.works
Certified LeSS Coach launched!
A LeSS Coach is someone who can meaningfully guide an organization toward simpler, more effective and customer focussed product development.
We’re excited to launch the Certified LeSS Coach program, created for practitioners who want to move beyond understanding LeSS and actually lead real organizational change. It gives you the mentorship, structure, and support needed to navigate leadership, simplify organizations, and guide a LeSS adoption with confidence.
The program is open to Scrum Masters, (Agile and technical) Coaches, and Executives. Through continuous mentoring, you apply LeSS thinking directly to your own environment and grow your capability in Lean, systems thinking, technical excellence, and organizational design.
With two levels—CLC1 for developing LeSS adopters and CLC2 for those ready to mentor others—the program builds both mastery and community. We’re thrilled to finally make this path available to everyone who wants to meaningfully shape how their organization works at scale.
A LeSS Story - Episode 1 - Sprint Planning in LeSS
Robert Briese has been working on an awesome series to experience how LeSS practically works.
In this episode, we follow five teams planning one Sprint together the LeSS way, from a shared Product Backlog to a fast, collaborative design huddle.
The Product Owner sets priorities, teams pull work one by one, and knowledge spreads so the most important items get done.
Multi-team Sprint Planning Two shows how quick coordination replaces heavy meetings. You’ll learn practical patterns for shared planning, distributing high-priority work, lightweight design, and “Just Talk / Just Scream” coordination.
Stop Building Fake Platforms!
Collapsing technical and business platform silos into one commodity platform group removes dependencies, speeds up delivery, and restores product-team autonomy. Instead of forcing adoption, the platform must earn it—operating under Russell Ackoff’s Internal Market Economies with stable contracts, fair pricing, and freedom of choice.
This creates a self-regulating system where only non-differentiating functionality is centralized, product teams focus on customer value, and the platform continuously improves to stay relevant. The result: clarity, speed, financial transparency, and a healthier balance between platform foundations and real product innovation...
Video: CafeTalk 6 - An Overview of the LeSS Principles
Continuing the video series, Bas Vodde and Bastiaan van Hamersveld introduce the ten LeSS principles and show how they shape organizational structure, team behavior, and real product development. They connect these principles to Scrum, Lean Thinking, and Systems Thinking, explaining why they are essential for scaling with clarity and purpose. A clear and practical starting point for anyone learning or reconnecting with the foundations of LeSS.
Click to play!
LeSSons: LeSS in Action
Each month we will highlight one LeSSon, a course that strengthens your LeSS adoption; this month, we’re featuring LeSS in Action.
LeSS in Action is a five-day, immersive developer training where participants learn by doing real product development, not by running simulations. You work in actual feature teams on an existing product, experiencing a full Sprint with authentic teamwork, cross-team coordination, Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and AI-augmented development. Concepts are taught in the moment they’re needed, making the learning practical, contextual, and immediately applicable; a form of education that simply cannot be replicated through classroom lectures alone.
The course is equally valuable for developers and non-developers in product teams. ScrumMasters, Product Owners, and others gain a an inside view of how real teams design, integrate, test, and deliver together. Many organizations notice rapid improvements afterward—not only in technical capability, but in collaboration, decision-making, and shared problem-solving. It’s a unique opportunity to experience how large-scale product development actually works.