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LeSS Newsletter August 2026

31/08/2026

Hi 👋

Notice how the big organisational promises keep landing on the same doorstep? Resilience against the next shock, compliance in a regulated world, AI that actually pays off, even sustainability, the pitch is always to bolt them on as another initiative. And they keep failing, because none of them is a thing you can add. They’re what a well-designed organisation produces, or fails to.

The evidence keeps piling up. MIT’s State of AI in Business study found that 95% of enterprise generative-AI pilots deliver no measurable return, and the rare 5% that do aren’t the ones with the best models: they’re the ones that changed how the work is owned and organised around it. Kearney’s 2026 transformation report tells the same story from the other side, success rates stuck near 30% even as AI investment surges, with resistance and structure, not technology, as the wall. The tool was never the bottleneck. The structure around it was.

You can’t bolt resilience, compliance, AI-speed or sustainability onto a broken structure. They’re all outputs of organisational design.

This month’s ideas, ready to put into practice:

🎫 One more thing: seats for the Global LeSS Conference Japan 2026 are limited and nearly gone, if you’re planning to join us in Tokyo, now’s the moment.

Enjoy, and keep learning!  

Bastiaan van Hamersveld
CEO at less.works, email: bastiaan@less.works

CafeTalk 15: Will AI Replace Scrum Masters?

Robert Briese

☕ “AI can dramatically accelerate product development, but if your organisation is full of silos, handovers and bottlenecks, AI may simply accelerate those problems too.”

In CafeTalk 15, Bastiaan and Robert Briese ask the question everyone’s circling: will AI replace Scrum Masters? Their answer runs through LeSS and the Product Operating Model, empowered product teams under a single Product Backlog, and what actually changes for Product Owners and Scrum Masters as AI speeds everything up. The through-line: technological acceleration without organisational redesign compounds the inefficiencies you already have.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why AI amplifies silos, handovers and bottlenecks rather than removing them, unless the structure changes first
  • How the Scrum Master role shifts under AI pressure, and which skills to grow now
  • Where AI genuinely helps: tightening feedback loops, not just automating process
  • How single-Product-Backlog / empowered-team design reshapes the Product Owner role across many teams

👀 Watch the AI + Scrum Master debate ➔

Don’t Put It in the Backlog

Frederic Siepmann

📋 Your requirements are not your backlog, and blurring the two quietly kills your ability to stay agile in a regulated world.

Writing on agile-in-medtech.works, Frederic Siepmann makes a sharp distinction that matters far beyond MedTech: requirements describe what the product must be and live for the product’s whole lifetime; the backlog holds the actionable work to get there. Conflate them and requirements get chained to a single implementation, refinement stalls, and traceability, legally mandated in regulated environments, becomes a mess. Separate them and you keep both compliance and adaptability.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why requirements (permanent, solution-neutral) and backlog items (actionable work) deserve to live apart, especially where traceability is mandated
  • How strong, well-attended refinement with developers, POs, customers and support surfaces requirements iteratively, no Requirements Engineer “pseudo-role” in between
  • Turning refinement examples into automated tests, and building a shared, customer-facing language for the work
  • Why research and experiment tasks belong in the backlog: “failed experiments look inefficient, but they are often the only way you can figure out how the real world works”

📰 See the requirements-vs-backlog split →

Building Business Resilience for Changing Times

Alexey Krivitsky

🛡️ You can’t promise an organisation resilience. But you can design it to be adaptive, and adaptivity is what makes it resilient.

Closing the 2025 LeSS Conference in Singapore, Alexey Krivitsky makes a sharp move: resilience isn’t a deterministic goal you can engineer directly, but adaptivity is, and it brings resilience as a side effect. His proof is the Poster POS case study, a Ukrainian point-of-sale company that outlasted four COVID lockdowns and a full-scale war (blocking its Russian client base by choice, shipping from a city with no electricity) and was profitable again within a year. They never set out to “be resilient”; they flipped from fragmented component teams to one Product Owner, one Product Backlog and six feature teams to keep working on the most valuable thing, and resilience followed.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why resilience is non-deterministic, so you design for adaptivity instead, and get resilience for free
  • The three things that quietly kill it: blocking dependencies, fixating teams on local roadmaps, and blocking easy experimenting & learning (plus ignoring economical health)
  • Why LeSS can say “there are no dependencies”, it structurally turns them into shared work, and why the whole-product focus beats stream-aligned silos (the “cat-paw team” trap)
  • How to avoid the reorg treadmill (the “1X org”): don’t sell people the framework picture, get them talking about real org dynamics instead

👀 Watch: design for adaptivity ➔

Conference Speaker Spotlight: Sofia Pelzl

Sofia Pelzl

🌱 Bolting a sustainability programme onto a broken structure changes nothing. Sofia Pelzl’s argument: sustainability is what good org design produces, not another initiative, and she brings it to Tokyo.

Ahead of the Global LeSS Conference Japan 2026, we’re spotlighting one of the speakers. In her talk “Sustainability with LeSS”, Sofia shows how LeSS, as a coherent organisational design, fosters systems thinking, continuous learning and reduced waste, and why true sustainability comes from structural decisions, not extra programmes. She frames it through output → outcome → impact, accessible for beginners but with depth for experienced practitioners. She’s also running a second session, the hands-on workshop “Motivating cross-functional learning”.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why sustainability is the result of sound organisational design, not a separate initiative
  • How LeSS drives systems thinking, continuous learning and less waste as a coherent whole
  • The output → outcome → impact lens for moving beyond “shipping more”
  • Where to catch both of Sofia’s sessions, the talk and the cross-functional-learning workshop, in Tokyo

🗾 See both of Sofia’s Tokyo sessions →

LeSS Case Study: Evolving Y Soft’s Organizational Design

Mark Uijen de Kleijn

🖨️ If shipping one feature takes four sprints across nine teams, the problem isn’t your people, it’s the org design. Here’s how Y Soft rebuilt theirs, twice.

In this case study, Mark Uijen de Kleijn and Jurgen De Smet chart Y Soft’s R&D organisation (120+ people across Brno, Prague, Ostrava and Copenhagen) moving from component teams and governance committees to customer-centric feature teams. The story’s real lesson isn’t a single re-org: it’s evolving the organisational design based on inspection and learning, redesigning the structure twice in 18 months as understanding deepened.

What you’ll learn:

  • How a “LeSS flip-forward” replaced 9 component teams with cross-functional feature teams on one product backlog, folding test and release work into the teams
  • Why they redesigned again (“Flip 2”): removing a management layer, swapping Scrum Masters for agile coaches, and letting teams own hiring, onboarding and escalation
  • What actually shifted: fewer dependencies, direct customer contact, faster feedback, and a CEO who wrote code in a mob and never believed he could
  • The human cost too, ~20% first-year attrition from unclear volunteering messaging, and how they addressed it

🍿 Read how they flipped twice →