Abstract: The Lean Tech Manifesto
The release of the Agile Manifesto on February 13th, 2001, marked a revolutionary shift in how tech organizations think about work. By empowering development teams, Agile cut through the red tape in software development and quickly led to significant improvements in innovation speed and software quality.
This new and refreshing approach brought by Agile led to its adoption beyond just the scope of a development team, spreading across entire companies, far beyond the initial context it was designed for by the manifesto’s original thinkers. And here lies the problem: the Agile Manifesto was designed for development teams, not for organizations with hundreds or even thousands of people.
As enthusiasts of Agile, Benoît and I went through phases of excitement and then frustration as we experienced these limitations firsthand while Theodo grew and our clients became larger. What gave us hope was seeing organizations on both sides of the Pacific, in Japan and California, achieve levels of growth and success almost unmatched while retaining the principles that made the Agile movement so compelling.
The “Lean Tech Manifesto” is the result of spending the past 15 years studying these giants and experimenting as we scaled our own business. It tries to build on the genius of the original 2001 document but adapt it to a much larger scale. I will share the connection we identified between Agile and Lean principles and also the tech innovations that we found the best tech organisations adopt to distribute work and maintain team autonomy.
Meet Fabrice Bernhard
Fabrice Bernhard is the co-author of The Lean Tech Manifesto and the Group CTO of Theodo, a leading technology consultancy he cofounded with Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle and scaled from 10 people in 2012 to 700 people in 2022. Based in Paris, London and Casablanca, Theodo uses Agile, DevOps, and Lean to build transformational tech products for clients all over the world, including global companies—such as VF Corporation, Raytheon Technologies, SMBC, Biogen, Colas, Tarkett, Dior, Safran, BNP Paribas, Allianz, and SG—and leading tech scale-ups—such as ContentSquare, ManoMano, and Qonto.
Fabrice is an expert in technology and large-scale transformations and has contributed to multiple startups scaling more sustainably with Lean thinking. He has been invited to share his experience at international conferences, including the Lean Summit, DevopsDays, and CraftConf. The Theodo story has been featured in multiple articles and in the book Learning to Scale at Theodo Group.
Fabrice is also the co-founder of the Paris DevOps meetup and an active YPO member. He studied at École Polytechnique and ETH Zürich and lives in London with his two sons.
Fabrice’s Book: The Lean Tech Manifesto.
Fabrice on LinkedIn.