LeSS Newsletter - February 2026
February 24, 2026Hi 👋
The AI hype is meeting reality.
Early 2026, cross organizations, a clear pattern is emerging: AI doesn’t unlock value on its own, but organizational design does. Many companies see local productivity gains, but struggle to turn them into real, system-level impact because work is still fragmented across silos, projects, and handoffs.
The organizations making progress are doing the opposite. They’re redesigning how teams collaborate, how decisions are made, and how learning happens; and only then scaling AI. AI amplifies whatever system you already have.
That’s exactly where LeSS comes in. This month’s newsletter explores how organizational design, learning, and real product focus remain the decisive factors in an AI-driven world.
What’s inside this month?
- 📘 New book to explore: 10X Org
- 🇯🇵 LeSS Tokyo Conference opened Call-for-Proposals 👈
- ✍️ "Project-based funding in Product Development" blog post by Bas Vodde
- 📖 A LeSS Story #3 "Multi-Team Product Backlog Refinement" by Robert Briese
- ☕ CafeTalk, discussing "AI is our saviour!?" with co-author Roland Flemm of 10X Org
- 📚 LeSSons in the picture: Designing Agile Organizations by Cesario Ramos
Enjoy, and keep learning!
— Bastiaan van Hamersveld
CEO at less.works, email: bastiaan@less.works
New Book: 10X Org
🤖 What would you do if your CEO asked: “When do you think we can turn down new hires by turning up AI?”
That question is the spark for 10× Org, a book that cuts straight through AI hype and management theater to the real issue: how your organization is designed to work.
Co-authored by Craig Larman (co-creator of LeSS) and Alexey Krivitsky (LeSS Trainer), this book argues that AI doesn’t create breakthroughs on its own. It amplifies whatever system you already have; good or bad. If your organization is fragmented, siloed, and optimized locally, AI will simply help you fail faster.
10X Org introduces a clear, practical way to look at organizations as systems, using Org Topologies to expose hidden constraints, outdated structures, and false assumptions. It shows why real performance gains come from redesigning how people collaborate, learn, and own outcomes, not from adding tools, frameworks, or pressure.
This is not a book about working harder or squeezing out marginal gains. It’s about building organizations that can learn, adapt, and stay relevant in an AI-driven world, with LeSS as a concrete example of an adaptive organizational design.
“Org Topologies forces an honest look at how the organization truly works, not how the slide decks pretend it works. It sets the stage for a blunt reality check that leaders can't dodge anymore. " - Jürgen de Smet
Call for Proposals is OPEN — Share Your LeSS Story in Tokyo 🇯🇵
🎤 Have a real LeSS story to tell? A workshop, experiment, game, or lesson learned the hard way?
The Call for Proposals for the Global LeSS Conference Tokyo 2026 is officially open and we’re explicitly looking beyond the usual suspects.
💡 We’re especially excited about:
- Real-world experiences (photos, boards, videos welcome!)
- Unique perspectives from practitioners, leaders, and change agents
- Sessions for LeSS newcomers and bold LeSS-adjacent ideas
- Stories from different industries, cultures, and viewpoints
No polished theory decks required — this conference is about what actually happened, what you learned, and what others can learn from it.
📅 Submission deadline: April 30, 2026
👉 Submit your proposal and be part of the conversation →
Project-based funding in Product Development
📊 In LeSS, development changes from project-based development to product-based development. What does that mean in practice?
Project-based development
Project-based development uses the concept of projects for managing work. A project has a goal, a relatively fixed scope, an expected timeline, and is funded and prioritised as one whole. When a project is over, it is over. If you want new work to be done, you’ll need to fund a new project. Management often assumes...
Qualified Scrum Practitioner launched!
🚢 Scrum often works well for a single team... until reality kicks in.
Multiple teams, one product, shared backlogs, dependencies, AI and growing coordination needs quickly expose the limits of “Scrum-by-the-book.”
The Qualified Scrum Practitioner (QSP) course is our new entry point for anyone involved in product development; managers, executives, engineers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, data analysts, who want to practice Scrum as it was intended: focused on product value, learning, and collaboration, both within a single Scrum team and across multiple teams working on the same product.
The course was developed together with the Society for Adaptive Organisations, reflecting a shared interest in helping organizations respond effectively to increasing complexity.
This highly practical course builds a strong foundation in principles and everyday practices, while explicitly preparing participants for multi-team product development, future LeSS adoptions, and a pathway for trainers to apply and grow within the LeSS ecosystem. Less theory, more doing; grounded in real-world product work.
🎓 Trainers are also welcome to teach this course. Drop us a line!
A LeSS Story #3 "Multi-Team Product Backlog Refinement in LeSS"
🍺 What really happens after the Sprint starts in a LeSS organization?
In this third video of the LeSS Stories series, you step inside a real product organization and see how multiple teams collaborate as one system, without heavy coordination, handoffs, or central control.
You’ll see how communities of practice emerge, teams reach out directly to real users for early feedback, and Product Backlog Refinement becomes a shared, multi-team activity rather than a role-owned meeting.
The video shows LeSS in action: teams refining backlog items together, developers collaborating across functions, and a Product Owner setting direction while teams own the details.
If you’re curious how LeSS enables fast feedback, strong alignment, and real collaboration at scale. This is what it looks like, day to day.
Video: CafeTalk - 10X Org, AI is our saviour!
🏗️ What does it really take to build a 10× organization in the age of AI?
In this talk with Roland Flemm, co-author of the book 10X Org, we explore why organizational design, not frameworks, tools, or AI hype, is the real driver of sustainable performance. You’ll hear why many organizations are still designed for an Industrial Age reality, how careless AI adoption often makes existing problems worse, and how adaptive organizational design changes what’s possible.
💡 What’s inside:
- What a “10× organization” really means (and what not!)
- Why AI can’t fix broken organizations on its own
- How organizational design and AI reinforce, or undermine, each other
- The role of learning as a core capability, not a side activity
- How LeSS fits into the broader 10× Org thinking as an adaptive design
A thoughtful, grounded conversation for leaders, coaches, and practitioners who want to build organizations that can truly adapt in an AI-driven world.
Click to play! 👆
LeSSons: Designing Agile Organizations
🌟 LeSSons are supporting courses for LeSS ecosystems
LeSS deliberately focuses on product development at scale, and that’s also where many organizations discover a broader question: what else needs to change around it to really make this work? Designing Agile Organizations, by Cesario Ramos (Certified LeSS Trainer), is a strong companion for that journey. It treats agility as an organizational design challenge, not a set of practices to roll out, and helps leaders and coaches reason about structure, capabilities, governance, and decision-making as a coherent system.
This LeSSon is especially valuable when LeSS sparks deeper conversations about strategy, boundaries, and fit-for-purpose design. It offers practical tools to diagnose the current organization, identify capability gaps, and deliberately evolve structures that support learning, flow, and adaptability; exactly the conditions LeSS depends on to thrive. If you’re looking to complement LeSS with a broader organizational design perspective, this is a solid place to explore further.
