Mik, author of Project to Product and his new book Output to Outcome, joins Peter and Dave to talk about what happens when coding stops being the bottleneck. For years, business teams fought to get their feature into the next plan because delivery capacity was scarce. With agents taking that constraint away, the bottleneck moves. It might be customer adoption, security reviews, budget, or how long it takes to get real feedback. Mik walks through the outcome loop, which connects strategy and budget to outputs and then to customer and business outcomes, and explains how to apply the theory of constraints to it. He also covers the outcome tree, a way of cascading company-level targets down to the value streams doing the work. Peter and Dave push on the hard parts: business leaders who can’t name their top outcome, B2B teams that wait months for usable feedback, and operating models that fall apart once the leader who championed them moves on.
Chapters:
0:00 Welcome And The New Book
2:05 When Agile Teams Lose The Business
5:05 Why Software Cannot Be Planned
8:10 Scarcity Thinking Creates Feature Fights
9:50 AI Moves The Bottleneck Downstream
12:25 The Outcome Loop Explained
14:55 Finding Constraints With Telemetry
21:30 Outcome Trees And Strategy Cascade
27:17 Measuring Outcomes With Slow Feedback
30:48 Operating Models That Actually Stick
35:27 Three Takeaways And Closing
This week’s takeaways:
When AI removes coding as the constraint, the bottleneck shows up somewhere else, so measure the whole loop from budget to customer outcome and go find it.
If a team can’t connect its work to a company-level outcome, the strategy was never decomposed, and moving faster only makes that gap more obvious.
Outcome ownership needs to sit with the teams closest to the work, with the business at the table, and the operating model has to outlast any single leader.
Listen to the full episode at definitelymaybeagile.com
Subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Have a question or topic you’d like us to cover? Reach out at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com