The Lean Tech Manifesto With Fabrice Bernhard [Video]

TL; DR: The Lean Tech Manifesto With Fabrice Bernhard: Hands-on Agile #65

Join Fabrice Bernhard on how the “Lean Tech Manifesto” solves the challenge of scaling Agile for large organizations and enhances innovation and team autonomy (note: the recording is in English).

Lean Tech Manifesto Abstract

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 improved innovation speed and software quality.

Agile’s new and refreshing approach led to its adoption beyond just the scope of a development team, spreading across entire companies far beyond the initial context the manifesto’s original thinkers designed for it. And here lies the problem: the Agile Manifesto was intended for development teams, not for organizations with hundreds or thousands of people.

As enthusiasts of Agile, Fabrice and his partner went through phases of excitement and then frustration as they experienced these limitations firsthand while their company grew and our clients became larger. What gave them hope was seeing organizations on both sides of the Pacific, in Japan and California, achieve growth and success almost unmatched while retaining the principles that made the Agile movement so compelling.

The “Lean Tech Manifesto” resulted from spending the past 15 years studying these giants and experimenting as they scaled their business. It tries to build on the genius of the original 2001 document but adapt it to a much larger scale. Fabrice shares the connection we identified between Agile and Lean principles and the tech innovations we found the best tech organizations 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 with his two sons in London.

Connect with Fabrice Bernhard on LinkedIn.