What the SCARF Model Reveals About Human Reaction to Change

Anyone who has led organizational change has seen a predictable pattern. The change is introduced. Resistance follows. Performance drops. Teams struggle through uncertainty before things stabilize at a new normal, if they get there at all. The initiative is sound. The case for change is clear. And yet people resist and what looked straightforward on paper…

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Supervised Learning: How Machines Learn from Examples

Supervised learning is the branch of machine learning behind spam filters, fraud detection systems, medical imaging tools, and large language models like ChatGPT. Understanding how it works, and where it reaches its limits, matters for anyone making decisions about building or buying AI-powered products. What Supervised Learning Actually Is Supervised learning is a method where a…

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Incremental Product Funding: How Validated Learning Protects Your Product Investment

Every product investment starts with something the organization believes in. The budget gets approved, the team gets staffed, and the work begins. Then the product launches and falls flat. The postmortem reveals that customers didn't need it, didn't want it, or weren't willing to pay for it. The budget is gone, and the organization is left…

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Machine Learning: The Engine Behind Modern AI

Product leaders today operate in a field shaped by AI. This is the first in a series of posts that maps that field, starting with the foundational concepts: what AI is, how machine learning works, and what distinguishes the main approaches in use today. AI vs. Machine Learning Artificial intelligence refers to systems that can perform…

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How to Manage Stakeholders Using the Power Interest Matrix

Stakeholder management takes real time. The bigger the initiative, the longer the list of people who have a stake in the outcome. Most teams respond by treating everyone roughly the same: the same email, the same update cadence, the same level of access. That is where the time goes. The power/interest matrix, developed by Aubrey Mendelow…

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2026 Global Scrum Gathering

On May 5, 2026, Fadi Stephan and Stephen Ritchie attended the Global Scrum Gathering in Vancouver, Canada, and presented The Impact of AI on Agile Engineering Practices. Below are some of the resources mentioned in the talk: Abstract AI and vibe coding is reshaping how teams build software, but what about our Agile principles and practices?…

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The Impact of AI on Agile Engineering Practices

Life is good. Sit back, chill and let AI do its thing. And probably not in an office setting, but at the pool or on the beach. If this is the state of software engineering and coding, where AI is writing the code and engineers are relaxing, do we care about quality code and agile engineering…

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OpenAI’s Five Levels of AI: A Roadmap From Chatbots to AGI

OpenAI has mapped out five levels of AI capability on the path to Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. It has become a useful way to understand where AI is today, what comes next, and how far the progression extends. The five levels are: Chatbots, Reasoners, Agents, Innovators, and Organizations. Each represents a meaningful increase in what…

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Three Levels of AI Capability Every Leader Should Understand

The AI powering your credit card fraud detection, the AI drafting your team's content, and the AI researchers are working toward next represent fundamentally different levels of capability. Where a given system sits on that progression changes how you deploy it, what you invest in, and what you should realistically expect from it. Narrow AI: The…

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AI Is Not Just Another Tech Trend. It’s a Paradigm Shift.

Every generation or so, a technology comes along that doesn't just improve what exists. It rewrites the rules entirely. Economists Timothy Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg coined the term General Purpose Technology, or GPT, for this kind of technology. These technologies share three defining characteristics: they spread across most sectors of the economy, they improve over time,…

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WSJF and Cost of Delay: Prioritizing for Economic Value Throughput

Part 3 of the Prioritization Series Previously in this series: Part 1 covered foundational techniques like MoSCoW and Impact/Effort. Part 2 covered scoring frameworks: ICE, RICE, and Weighted Scoring. The scoring frameworks from Part 2 help you rank work by value, but they have no way to account for what delay costs the business. Sequencing decisions…

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What Does Value Mean in Product Development? It Depends on Your Product’s Strategic Context

Ask ten people in a product organization what value means, and you will get ten different answers. The head of engineering points to reliability. The product manager points to adoption. The CFO points to margin. The customer success lead points to retention. Everyone is partially right, and the disagreement is rarely resolved because the underlying question…

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PMI NYC 2026

On March 24, 2026, Fadi Stephan presented Building High-Performing Teams at the PMI NYC monthly chapter meeting. Below are some of the resources mentioned in the talk: Building High-Performing Team Slides High Performing Teams Canvas To learn more about how to build high-performing teams, check out the Building High Performing Teams Workshop.

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Why You Can’t Kick Off a Scrum Team Like a Project

Most teams know how to start a project. You write a charter, hold a kick-off, and get to work. Launching a Scrum team requires something different, and treating it like a project kick-off is one of the more common ways organizations undermine a new team before it ever ships anything. What a Traditional Project Kick-Off Actually…

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Netflix Case Study on Business Agility

In 2000, Blockbuster generated nearly $800 million from late fees. That same year, Netflix eliminated late fees entirely, walking away from revenue its competitor couldn't live without. One company adapted to what customers wanted. The other protected what its business model required. Today, Netflix's market cap exceeds $325 billion (as of February 2026). Blockbuster no longer…

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