The Agile CEO The Operating Model You Can’t Afford to Ignore with Matthew Jacobs, Chief Product Owner of Consulting at Scrum Inc. | The Agile CEO
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Sep 23, 2025 Matthew Jacobs, Chief Product Owner of Consulting at Scrum Inc., dives into the complexities of operating models and how they often fail in today’s fast-paced world. He emphasizes the need for simplicity and speed in organizational structures. Jacobs suggests aligning leadership with delivery teams to combat systemic blockers and advocates for treating transformations as Agile projects. He warns leaders to stay involved in designing their operating engines, while also balancing centralization and decentralization for optimal learning and innovation.
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Three Core Levers Of An Agile Model
- An agile operating model focuses on customer-driven alignment, continuous improvement, and incremental delivery.
- The delivery system must be structured to produce small increments and gather customer feedback quickly.
Start With Why And Run Experiments
- Start every operating model change by clarifying the why and the gap to your desired organization.
- Design simple experiments and iterate rather than pre-planning a big waterfall transformation.
Find Breakages By Asking About Workarounds
- Ask people where they work around policies to reveal systemic breakages instead of assuming the system is fine.
- Run a baseline assessment against your future state and select a few experiments to isolate impact.