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| Image Credit: Created with Gemini |
The Promise of Agile: A Personal Journey
I recall my first exposure to working with an Agile team in 2004. I went from being a "resource" assigned to multiple projects concurrently—a cog in the machine of "maximum utilization"—to becoming a member of a highly collaborative cross-functional team aligned with the singular objective of building the best applications possible for our customers.
We ditched the 100+ page Business Requirement Documents and Functional Design Specifications in favor of a backlog of well-articulated and prioritized user stories, each delivering discrete value. Our interactions with business stakeholders and customers became frequent, quick, frictionless, and filled with ever-increasing trust, as opposed to contentious “negotiations” about requirements or meeting a fixed budget, timeline, and set of scope.
The transformation was profound. We compressed the time from concept to public production launch from 6-9 months to demonstrating "potentially shippable software" in two-week iterations and releasing every few iterations. We worked in lockstep with business stakeholders, adjusting our roadmap based on their feedback and early customer testing results. We leveraged Extreme Programming practices to build quality into our code while sharing knowledge and ownership across the team.
At the end of each iteration, we held retrospectives to identify ways to improve our collective work. We operated with discipline and focus, building trust with stakeholders by consistently delivering working software and incorporating their feedback. It was a joy—a more human and humane way of working that honored individual creativity and collective purpose.
The Scaling Challenge: When Team Agility Meets Organizational Complexity
As I progressed in my career, I led increasingly larger teams and helped numerous organizations adopt Agile and Lean practices. A pattern emerged: Agile practices worked beautifully at the team level, but they needed more robust scaffolding when scaling across multiple teams.
We implemented Scrum of Scrums to identify and resolve cross-team dependencies. We explored ways to merge code bases continuously, but these efforts were sometimes challenging when multiple teams were working against monolithic architectures. The fundamental question remained: Can the Agile principles that transform a team so effectively also work across the entire organization, or is more required.
I remember attending an AgileNYC Agile Day event many years ago (not sure if this was 2011 or 2016) where Ken Schwaber, a co-founder of Scrum and signatory of the Agile Manifesto, gave the keynote. During Q&A, I asked whether the Manifesto would ever be updated or revised. I wanted to know whether it would get updated to address the scaling challenges many organizations faced. His response was that he didn’t see the Agile Manifesto geting updated.
Though I didn't press further, the question lingered for me. Would the same Agile principles suffice as organizations grew more extensive and more complex? Could organizational agility emerge simply by replicating team-level practices, or did scaling demand a fundamentally different mode of thinking?
This question wasn't new even then. Practitioners consistently found that while Agile practices thrived at the team level, their benefits diminished across entire organizations. Various frameworks emerged to address this gap—Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and others—each with passionate advocates and critics.
The Lean Tech Manifesto: A Bridge Between Team Agility and Organizational Scale
Last week, I watched Jim Womack's keynote presentation, 'Lean Thinking: Past, Present & Future' at the UK Lean Summit 2024. Womack, a Lean thought leader whose seminal works "The Machine That Changed the World" and "Lean Thinking" explained how “Toyota's Production System” revolutionized manufacturing, and introduced its lessons to Western audiences. He mentioned optimism about the future given creative engagement with Lean thinking and the tech world (20m50s). This immediately captured my attention, especially when he mentioned the Lean Tech Manifesto as a powerful melding of the Agile Manifesto, modern tech world practices, and foundational Lean Thinking principles. Could this be the missing bridge that many organizations have been searching for?
I immediately watched "The Lean Tech Manifesto with Fabrice Bernhard—Hands-on Agile #65, which intrigued me as I wondered whether my questions about scaling would be addressed.
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| Image Credit: Screenshot from The Lean Tech Manifesto with Fabrice Bernhard—Hands-on Agile #65 |
The premise is compelling: the Agile Manifesto excels at the team level but doesn't adequately scale to large technology organizations. The most successful companies have intuitively applied Lean Thinking to achieve organizational agility. Rather than rejecting Agile, the Lean Tech Manifesto distills and scales its principles, infusing them with Lean Thinking for the digital age.
Four core tenets of the Lean Tech Manifesto resonated deeply with my experience: (Full Disclosure: I have ordered but not read the Lean Tech Manifesto, authored by Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle and Fabrice Bernhard, so the following are my take aways from the presentation by Fabrice Bernhard.)
1. ‘Value for the Customer’
"Value for the Customer should be the organizational North Star," the manifesto boldly declares. This isn't merely a slogan; it's an organizing principle for technology organizations seeking true scalable agility.
While the Agile Manifesto emphasizes "customer collaboration over contract negotiation," the Lean Tech Manifesto goes further, advocating that every decision and initiative must directly connect to delivering customer value. This represents a shift from team-level customer focus to embedding customer value in organizational DNA—from processes to architecture to performance metrics.
2. ‘A Tech-Enabled Network of Teams’
Scaling is fundamentally about flow, and flow requires reducing dependencies and enabling autonomy and self-service at the team level. The Lean Tech Manifesto champions reducing direct dependencies through modular design and creating truly autonomous teams.
Consider Amazon's transformation into one of the world's most Agile large enterprises. Their API-driven architecture and "two-pizza teams" philosophy weren't accidents—they were deliberate architectural and organizational choices that maximized autonomy while maintaining alignment. This modularity allows teams to innovate and move rapidly without constant bottlenecks or approvals, a critical factor in scaling value delivery.
3. ‘Right-First-Time and Just-In-Time’
The Lean Tech Manifesto draws directly from the Toyota Production System—the gold standard of large-scale, high-quality production—applying its principles to focus on Quality and creating Pull within technology organizations. The presentation specifically mentioned:
Jidoka: Automation with a human touch for quality, enabling systems to detect abnormalities and stop automatically
Dantotsu: Systematic problem-solving to eliminate defects at their root
Kanban: Visualizing workflow and limiting work in progress to optimize flow
These aren't theoretical concepts but proven, practical tools for achieving high-quality, continuous delivery at scale, extending beyond software development to the entire tech value stream.
4. ‘Building a Learning Organization’
The ultimate aim, as highlighted by the Lean Tech Manifesto, is to become a Learning Organization. Organizations that thrive are those that relentlessly focus on customer needs, build upon both successes and failures, and rapidly disseminate learning throughout their structure.
This requires cultivating a problem-solving culture, standardizing best practices, and embracing continuous, on-the-job learning at every level—a true embodiment of system-wide continuous improvement that goes beyond the team-level retrospectives of Agile.
Questions I Hope to Explore Further
Several questions remain that I'm eager to explore more deeply when I get to read Charles-Lavauzelle and Bernhard's book. I wonder if it helps to address:
Legacy Transformation: How do established companies with monolithic systems best transition to microservices with modular design and loosely-coupled architectures without disrupting current value delivery?
Remote/Distributed Implementation: In describing how to focus on "Value for the customer," the Lean Tech Manifesto advocates going to the gemba (where work happens), using product architecture to clarify value, and leveraging visual management. How are these practices best implemented in geographically distributed organizations with primarily remote workforces?
Integration with Existing Frameworks: How does the Lean Tech Manifesto complement or replace existing scaling frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, or DAD?
Agile and Lean in Harmony
The Lean Tech Manifesto operates at a different level than the Agile Manifesto—not contradicting it but building upon it. In my humble opinion, all organizations that build software should still value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
The Agile Software Manifesto and its principles remain every bit as relevant today as they did in 2001. The Lean Tech Manifesto melds Lean Thinking and the Agile Manifesto together in a way that can help large tech organizations. This shouldn’t be surprising given that similar origins inspire Lean and Agile, it makes sense that incorporating Lean Thinking into how organizations operate could deliver a lot of value.
Similarly, organizations can't simply adopt team-level Agile practices and expect to achieve organizational agility. They need a holistic approach that addresses architecture, leadership, culture, and learning systems—the very elements the Lean Tech Manifesto emphasizes.
From Agile Teams to Lean Organizations: A Call to Action
It's time to move beyond simply "scaling Agile practices." The real goal is to cultivate a Lean-Agile organization—one that embodies a Lean-Agile mindset at every level, from the boardroom to the individual contributor.
The Agile Manifesto ignited a crucial shift in how we build software. But to achieve true organizational agility in today's complex, fast-paced world, we must embrace the systems thinking of Lean. The Lean Tech Manifesto offers practical advice for large tech organizations.
This isn't just about adopting new processes; it's about a fundamental shift in organizational culture, focused on people, relentless value delivery, and continuous improvement. It's about building organizations that are not just fast but truly adaptable, deeply customer-centric, and constantly learning. Is your organization ready to evolve our thinking beyond team-level agility to embrace organizational flow, system-level quality, and enterprise-wide learning?
Let's move beyond just "doing Agile" to being Lean-Agile, at scale.
