--- title: Isn't Product Operating Model just Agile with a new name? description: It is easy to understand why it seems that Agile and Product Operating Model is the same thing, as both talk about similar concepts. In this article we unpack that question and look closer at how Agile fits into a Product Operating Model. date: 2026-06-05 author: Mikael Brodd keywords: Product Operating Model, Agile, SAFe, Spotify, product development, empowered teams, product strategy, product discovery category: Product Operating Model lastModified: 2026-06-05 slug: pom-vs-agile --- When we meet organizations, teach classes or run webinars, we sometimes get the question if the Product Operating Model isn't just Agile? What is really the difference? It is a fair question. On the surface, both talk about teams, feedback, learning, and customer value. So it is easy to see why it is confusing. But they solve different problems and operate at different levels in an organization. Let's look into how they are connected. ## The Agile Movement Agile did not start as an organizational model. It emerged in the 1990s as a response from software practitioners who were frustrated with heavyweight, plan-driven development methods. Projects were slow, feedback came too late, and despite extensive upfront planning, teams often built the wrong thing. In response, practitioners began experimenting with shorter iterations, closer collaboration, and faster feedback cycles to better handle uncertainty and change. As Agile quickly gained traction, many organizations adopted Agile ways of working on team-level to boost delivery, but it never fundamentally changed how decisions were made, how teams were empowered and organized, or how strategy connected to execution. This led to many failed transformations where the result was "Agile in name only". It became obvious that something more was needed. ## Frameworks to the rescue? In response, a number of frameworks emerged to fill this gap. SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, Scrum @ Scale and others, attempted to extend Agile beyond the team level by introducing structures for coordination, planning, and governance. At the same time, companies such as Spotify, Google, Amazon, Netflix and many others, developed their own ways of working based on their context, so that they consistently produced innovative products. While Agile scaling frameworks focused on coordinating larger numbers of teams, the successful product companies were experimenting with a broader set of questions around strategy, discovery, leadership and organizational design. These observations would later form much of the foundation for what is now known as the Product Operating Model (read more about how Spotify's way of working is a great example of a Product Operating Model in our article [The Product Model at Spotify](https://betterproductwork.com/blog/product-model-at-spotify)). This is where much of the confusion begins. As Agile was scaled and extended, a.k.a. "Enterprise Agile", it started to look less like a set of team-level principles and more like a complete organizational model. The boundaries blurred. What began as ways of improving how teams work gradually turned into prescriptive approaches for how organizations should operate. It became easy to assume that Agile already answered the questions around structure, decision-making and ownership. ![Choose an Agile Framework or develop your own way?](agile-framework-vs-own-way.png) ## What Agile gave us Many of the ideas we today associate with modern product development existed before Agile. What the Agile movement did was help package, spread and normalize them across the software industry. Agile put focus on creating organizations with stable, cross-functional, high-performing teams, iterative and incremental development, customer centricity with fast feedback-loops, adapting to change, servant leadership and much more. These ideas transformed software development and remain essential today. In fact, without these capabilities, a Product Operating Model is unlikely to succeed. ## What a Product Operating Model is Unlike most Agile scaling frameworks, which emerged from extending Agile practices to larger organizations, the Product Operating Model is better understood as a way of describing how many successful product companies organize around product development, strategy and empowered teams. This means that a Product Operating Model comes from a different perspective. Rather than focusing on how teams execute work, it addresses how the organization as a whole is designed to create value through their products. In our own interpretation of the Product Operating Model, we see four broad areas where successful product companies tend to operate differently: - **Build and deploy (Product Delivery)**, i.e. using iterative and incremental development together with continuous delivery, having infrastructure for product analytics and experimentation, instead of infrequent, big and complex releases - **Solve problems (Product Discovery)**, i.e. giving empowered product teams ownership of customer and business problems, and helping them discover effective solutions through fast learning, experimentation and cross-functional collaboration - **Decide which problems to solve (Product Strategy)**, i.e. having a product strategy with outcomes to achieve, driven by data informed insights and gives context and direction, instead of a laundry list of features to build decided by a HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) - **Lead and manage people and teams (Leadership)**, i.e. developing people and teams, providing strategic context and direction, instead of focusing on delivery coordination by micro management Agile transformed how organizations build and deploy software, while the Product Operating Model expands the focus beyond delivery to also include how organizations solve problems, set direction, lead teams and design for outcomes. ## How Agile and the Product Operating Model fits together In the Product Operating Model, Agile practices are used to improve how teams execute their work. Iterations, fast feedback loops, retrospectives, and close collaboration in cross-functional teams are all valuable because they help teams move faster, learn faster, and adapt as they go. In that sense, Agile remains an important part of the system, providing the way of working necessary to translate strategy into meaningful outcomes. At the same time, Agile is not just something that fits into the Product Operating Model, it is a prerequisite for it to work. The Product Operating Model relies on fast learning cycles, close collaboration, and the ability to continuously adapt based on new information. Without the practices and mindset introduced by Agile, this simply does not happen. Teams fall back into long feedback loops, handovers, and delayed validation. This distinction is critical. Many organizations adopt Agile practices but keep the same decision structures, governance, and planning processes. The result is often teams that work in iterations but still wait for direction, deliver predefined features, and have limited influence over what they build. Agile improves how they deliver, but not necessarily how organizations decide what is worth building. In the Product Operating Model, Agile is one of several enabling capabilities. It supports fast learning and effective execution, but it operates within a broader system designed for continuous value creation. ![How Agile fits into a Product Operating Model](agile-fits-into-pom.png) ## So what? The question of whether the Product Operating Model is just Agile, misses the point. If the system around the teams is not designed for learning, ownership, and fast decision-making, Agile will only improve local execution. Teams may work faster, but they will still build the wrong things, wait for decisions, and struggle to create meaningful outcomes. And that is the real difference. The Product Operating Model is not a replacement for Agile. It creates organizational conditions where Agile ways of working can deliver their full potential. Agile changed how we build and deploy software. Product Operating Models change how we build great products.