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Bridge Strategy to Delivery
Expert Insights from the Frontline of Transformation
Discover how leading UK enterprises are closing the gap between strategic vision and delivery execution. Real stories. Real metrics. Real results.
Insights Used By 117+ Organisations Across Financial Services, Gaming, Government & More
Authors With 50+ Years Combined Delivery Transformation Experience
Proven Results £13Bn+ Delivered Through Insights-Led Transformation
Featured This Month
Why Product-Led Growth (PLG) Fails in Big UK Organisations - and How to Do It Properly
Most UK enterprises want the outcomes of product-led growth - lower CAC, faster scaling, stronger retention - but very few want the operating-model surgery required to achieve it.
PLG isn’t a tactic or a funnel. It’s a multi-stage organisational journey that demands new teams, new governance, modern architecture and genuine autonomy.
Here’s how to do it properly.
6 days ago7 min read
AI Isn’t a Bubble-It’s a Wildfire. And We’re Already in It.
People often reach for metaphors when faced with uncertainty. It is a world-old instinct: to make sense of the unknown we compare it to what we already understand.
Lately, my entire feed seems to be holding onto one such metaphor - the idea that AI is a bubble about to burst. Maybe. I should say I respect the provenance of the “bubble” metaphor - it comes from decades of market cycles and hard-earned lessons about hype
Nov 205 min read
Competing with the Big Boys & Girls: Building an AI Centre of Excellence
For years small companies have been fast and nimble whilst larger firms are slow to adopt new approaches, but an uncomfortable truth about AI adoption is that large enterprises have the resources and dedicated teams to drive rapid transformation. The scale of benefit they can achieve is huge and has therefore made it a real focus for them. Smaller firms, by contrast, often struggle to give AI innovation the sustained focus and bandwidth it will need if they want to stay ahead
Nov 183 min read
Read by Topic
Strategy & Leadership
For CTOs, COOs, CPOs navigating transformation. How to align strategy with execution, lead through change, and build sustainable delivery capability.
Featured Post:
Delivery Excellence
For Scrum Masters, Delivery Leads, Agile Coaches. Practical frameworks to improve predictability, eliminate waste, and build high-performing teams.
Featured Post:
Product Thinking
For Product Managers, Product Owners, Product Directors, and CPOs. Move from output focus to outcome focus. Build products customers actually want to use.
Featured Post:
Scaling & Transformation
For enterprise leaders scaling delivery. Frameworks for SAFe, team topologies, portfolio governance. How to maintain agility at scale without bureaucracy.
Featured Post:
Culture &
Teams
For HR, Team Leads, and People Leaders. Build fundamental trust, psychological safety, and essential accountability. The critical human side of transformation.
Featured Post:
When Agility Breaks: How to Rebuild Trust and Momentum After Transformation Failure
When an agile transformation fails, most leaders respond with more control, not more trust. But rebuilding agility means restoring belief - in people, not process.
Darren Emery
Nov 105 min read
Delivery Transformation for COOs
Most “delivery transformations” fail before they begin - not because of technology, but because leadership starts with the wrong question.
The goal isn’t to make teams more agile; it’s to design a system that reliably converts strategic intent into customer outcomes.
This is the real work of delivery transformation for COOs - less about frameworks, more about flow, focus, and leadership design.
Darren Emery
Oct 276 min read
Why Great Strategies Die in Delivery
Most strategies don’t fail in the boardroom: they fail in translation. Across UK tech, leaders are crafting strong strategic visions only to watch them unravel during execution. The culprit isn’t ambition; it’s alignment. This article explores the four silent killers of delivery - miscommunication, misalignment, mis-coordination, and mis-adaptation - and outlines how top-performing companies turn strategy into a living system that drives real results.
Darren Emery
Oct 204 min read
What Happens After the Big Consultancy Leaves
When the big consultancy leaves, your real work begins. Most transformations don’t fail in the boardroom - they fail in the handover. This is your guide to turning glossy decks into operational momentum, one 90-day plan at a time.
Darren Emery
Oct 68 min read
The Speed Illusion: Why Motion Isn’t Momentum
Most leaders think they’re pushing their teams to move faster. In reality, they’re often rewarding behaviours that look like speed but quietly drain time, money, and trust. True speed isn’t about starting more work - it’s about finishing the right things, in the right order, with fewer unforced errors.
Darren Emery
Aug 114 min read
From Organisational Chaos to Clarity
You don’t have a reporting problem. You have a structure problem. When teams are stretched, priorities shift weekly, and outcomes are unclear - no dashboard will save you. This article shows how to fix the structure behind the chaos, using proven patterns from Team Topologies and OrgTopologies.
Darren Emery
Jul 286 min read
If Everyone’s Busy, Why Are We Still Behind?
In many mid-sized product organisations, busyness has become a proxy for progress. But full roadmaps, maxed-out teams, and delivery velocity aren't translating into market impact or innovation. This article breaks down why - revealing how systemic misfocus, fractured prioritisation, and reactive product roles are silently killing your speed. Learn how to rewire your operating model to shift from motion to momentum.
Darren Emery
Jul 215 min read
Stop Optimising Yesterday: How to Fund the Future Without Burning Today
Most teams aren’t failing to deliver. They’re just delivering the past.
This post reimagines the Three Horizons of Product Delivery - showing you how to balance innovation, scale, and stability before your roadmap becomes a liability.
Darren Emery
Jun 305 min read
Tech Debt is a Leadership Problem
Tech debt doesn’t begin in the codebase - it begins in the boardroom. This article exposes how leadership decisions, delayed investments, and strategic neglect create delivery drag across your organisation. If 40% of your tech budget is lost to invisible friction, it's time to rethink who really owns the problem.
Darren Emery
Jun 234 min read
Capability Before Capacity
Organisations often respond to delivery pressure by adding more teams - but without the right capabilities in place, this only scales dysfunction. In this article, we explore why capability must come before capacity, how to identify the real constraints in your system, and what to do instead of defaulting to headcount growth.
Darren Emery
Jun 164 min read
The Agile Industrial Complex
Agile was never meant to be a playbook - but that's exactly what it's become. In our latest article, we explore how the Agile Industrial Complex turned a mindset into merchandise, and what leaders can do to reclaim agility as a principle-driven, outcome-focused way of working. If your teams are running the rituals but not seeing the results, this one’s for you.
Darren Emery
Jun 95 min read
Team Topologies Meets Enterprise Reality
Most org charts look like neat boxes, but the real flow of work resembles a tangled subway/tube/metro map - overlapping lines, hidden bottlenecks, and missed connections. To deliver at scale, you need more than structure. You need flow by design.
Darren Emery
May 265 min read
Confessions of an agile obsessive!
I have a problem. It’s quite serious and it affects me everyday. I can’t seem to watch a TV programme without trying to find some (usually tenuous) way to connect it to product delivery and Agile. It’s an illness; I can’t stop. I’m not just ruining my own life, it’s spreading to my loved ones. My wife recently yelled at a team on Australian MasterChef: “Why don’t they test one fully made burger first? That’s Agile!” (*I guess this means she can’t leave me now) I don’
Abbas Dhanani
May 93 min read
Delivery Theatre: The Illusion of Progress That’s Slowing You Down
In today’s enterprises, delivery often looks busy but achieves little. Delivery Theatre explores the illusion of progress created by rehearsed rituals, vanity metrics, and agile-by-numbers. From Jira-driven busyness to transformation-by-slide-deck, this article unpacks why organisations confuse activity with outcomes—and how to break free from performative delivery to focus on real customer value, measurable impact, and strategic alignment.
Darren Emery
Apr 215 min read
The Evolution of SCRUM MASTERS:
How the Scrum Master role is evolving in the modern enterprise and how your organisation can be first mover to take advantage
Darren Emery
Nov 25, 20243 min read
OKRs for Leadership
Over the past twenty years the corporate world has seen significant change influenced by digital technology which has revolutionised the way that companies operate. Globalisation has led to increased complexity navigating different markets, each with their own regulatory environments and cultural values, and the pace of external, societal change has led to challenges predicting future trends. Companies have access to more data than ever before, but whilst access has increased
Darren Emery
Oct 23, 20243 min read
Are You the Puppet Master or the puppet?
Jira, love it or hate it? Either way, for a lot of organisations it’s necessary; it’s the main tool that development teams use to (1) track their work and for (2) stakeholders to understand whether the company is delivering the right value. If your company is doing both of those things, in a way that’s not burdensome to the teams - and - in a way that is both simple for stakeholders, then you don’t need to read this article. Rate yourself using the Jira20 below and see what
Abbas Dhanani
Oct 11, 20243 min read
Why Leaders Don’t Care About Culture
I was reading an article the other day from one of the big consultancy firms about organisational culture and why cultural change efforts fail. Honours degrees get you the prestige, but they don’t buy the experience: I swear these big consultancies haven’t ever been on the ground in the workplace because a lot of what is said is nonsense. Their number 1 reason why cultural change fails was “Leaders lack commitment”. I hear similar comments from the agile community when I ask
Darren Emery
Oct 17, 20233 min read
A Lesson from Golf to Transform Your Organisation
In my consultancy work I use sporting analogies a lot. My hero growing up was Andre Agassi, and he once said that every tennis match is a life in miniature. Sport mirrors our human experience – the drama of the game, the unpredictable outcomes, the highs and lows of emotion, the winning, the losing. I spent last weekend following the Ryder Cup and as I watched the European team lift the golden chalice for the ninth time since I became a covert of this event in 1997, I realise
Darren Emery
Oct 3, 20233 min read
How Not To Do An Agile Transformation
Many of the organisations agilicist are drafted into have already been through an “agile transformation”. But they aren’t “transformed”. Let me tell you a story. Probably 80% of our clients have been through these big transformations already. Usually they have been led by one of the very large, and very famous consulting groups who sell with the A-Team and deliver with the D-Team (at A-Team prices). These consultancies know all the theory, they say all the right things; The
Darren Emery
Sep 5, 20233 min read
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