Building capability, not dependency.
I'm a product and flow practitioner. I help teams and leaders turn strategy into outcomes, and build the capability to keep doing it after I've gone.
Recent thinking
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Grading OKRs is just resulting with better branding
Annie Duke's poker term for judging a decision by how it turned out is resulting, and last Friday of the quarter you did it in front of the whole room. Why OKR scores reward sandbaggers, punish good bets, and survive because they sound like rigour - and the one-sentence fix that changes grading Friday.
Some rituals are scaffolding. Some are anaesthetic.
Before you rip out a process everyone knows is broken, work out whether it’s holding the team up or taping its eyes shut.
The forecast was right. The conversation was wrong.
An 85% forecast that misses is the 15% showing up on schedule. That's the model working, not breaking. Why probabilistic practices die in the post-mortem, and what to do about it.
Who I am
I'm Paul Brown, a Partner at Thrivve Partners. I've spent 25+ years in product and flow-based delivery, working with teams and organisations to make probabilistic thinking, evidence, and good operating discipline part of how they work, not just how they talk.
My opinions come from doing the work, and I'm happy to have them tested. I'm a ProKanban Trainer, a regular Medium writer, and the author of the Full Value Lifecycle framework. Most of all, I want to leave organisations more capable than I found them, and able to keep going without me.
What I do
Flow
Flow & Delivery Practice
Designing delivery systems that make outcomes predictable, and leaving teams that can run them.
- Lightweight Kanban and Lean practices, sized to the actual problem
- Flow metrics, probabilistic forecasting, and reporting your leaders can act on
- Practical work on bottlenecks, blockers, handoffs, and queues
- Capability transfer, so the practice survives when I leave
Product
Product Practice
Helping teams discover, shape, and prioritise work that customers value and the business needs.
- Discovery work that mixes qualitative and quantitative evidence
- Decision frameworks that frame trade-offs honestly, including the trade-offs people would rather not see
- Roadmaps that connect strategy to outcomes, not output
- The shift from projects to products, with measurable outcomes that hold up
Training
Training & Workshops
Capability transfer for teams and leaders. No theatre, no filler.
I'm a ProKanban Trainer accredited to deliver every course in the curriculum, and I've led training and workshops for 600+ product and delivery practitioners. Run the courses in-house, or pick the modules that fit what your teams actually need to learn:
- Applying Professional Kanban (APK)
- Applying Flow Metrics for Scrum (AFMS)
- Applying Metrics for Predictability (AMP)
- Applying Scaled Portfolio Kanban (ASPK)
- Accelerating Product Value (APV)
Beyond the curriculum, I design purpose-built workshops, from discovery and strategy framing to OKR setting and decision facilitation, Design Sprints, and outcome-focused retros, depending on what you need to move forward.
Either way, you leave with artefacts you can use the next day, not just sticky notes.