Acend Insights — Every edition, one place
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Sharp thinking.
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Every Acend newsletter in one place. Real thinking from people who've done the work inside complex organisations — and have the results to show for it.

37+ Editions
5 Topic areas
2–5 min Read time
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💡
Better Thinking
Mindset, strategy & leadership clarity
10 editions
Better Thinking From Delivery Theatre to Valuable Impact Why looking busy and delivering value are two completely different things — and how to tell the difference.
3 min read
Better Thinking Slow Down to Speed Up The counter-intuitive truth about pace — why the fastest teams spend more time thinking before acting.
3 min read
Better Thinking Clear Writing Gives Poor Thinking Nowhere to Hide If you can't write it clearly, you can't think it clearly. The underrated leadership skill hiding in plain sight.
2 min read
Better Thinking So What? Being Busy ≠ Being Valuable The most dangerous question in any organisation — and why so few teams ask it often enough.
2 min read
Better Thinking Penny Drop Coaching The moment when someone truly understands something — and how to create more of them in your team.
3 min read
Better Thinking The Humble Innovator Why the most effective innovators are the ones who think they have the least to prove.
3 min read
Better Thinking Stop Trying to Change Your Team. Start Changing Yourself. The leadership insight that changes everything — and why most leaders never figure it out.
3 min read
Better Thinking How One Shift in Thinking Fuelled AI at Scale A global bank. One mindset change. And the AI transformation that followed. What they got right.
2 min read
Better Thinking Ethical Design in the Era of AI As AI accelerates, the question isn't just "can we build this?" — it's "should we?"
4 min read
Better Thinking What If Your Best Idea Isn't Yours? The counterintuitive truth about great product discovery — and why the best PMs steal ruthlessly.
3 min read
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Better Products
Agile delivery, product strategy & speed to market
9 editions
Better Products Moving at the Speed of Value Startups move fast. Enterprises move slow. Except when they don't — here's what changes the equation.
3 min read
 Better Products Gantt Gantt Gone "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." Why it's time to ditch the Gantt chart for good.
3 min read
 Better Products Improving Flow from Ideas to Outcomes Delivering customer value early and often — and why most teams are still doing the opposite.
2 min read
 Better Products Agile Isn't a Postcode Calling your standups "sprints" doesn't make you agile. What actually does — and what doesn't.
3 min read
 Better Products Why Good UX Sometimes Feels Worse The UX paradox nobody talks about: why the better the design, the more uncomfortable it can feel at first.
3 min read
 Better Products Your Portfolio Isn't a List — It's a Set of Bets How the best product organisations think about their portfolio — and why most treat it like admin.
3 min read
 Better Products Are We Over-Frameworked? SAFe. OKRs. RICE. Jobs to Be Done. When does the framework become the problem?
4 min read
 Better Products Antifragility: From Predictable to Perpetual Nassim Taleb's idea applied to product development — why some teams get stronger from disruption.
3 min read
 Better Products The Power of Focus The ruthless prioritisation principle that separates high-performing product teams from busy ones.
2 min read
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Better Teams
High performance, alignment & culture change
8 editions
Better Teams The Ferrari Stuck in Traffic When elite individual talent still produces slow organisations — and what's really causing the jam.
4 min read
 Better Teams Demand Always Outstrips Supply Workloads are growing faster than ever. Here's how high-performing teams deal with it without burning out.
3 min read
 Better Teams Through the User's Eyes Observations that fuel high-performing teams — and the habit most teams skip entirely.
3 min read
 Better Teams Freedom Within Fences: Andy Farrell's Leadership How Ireland's rugby coach built one of the world's best teams — and what product leaders can steal from it.
3 min read
 Better Teams Sharpening the SAW Covey's most underrated habit — and why the teams that invest in renewal always outperform those that don't.
4 min read
 Better Teams The Humble Beginner What experts can learn from beginners — and why the smartest people in the room are often the worst at this.
2 min read
 Better Teams Moving from Customer Centric to Product Centric The subtle but critical difference — and why getting this wrong derails most digital transformations.
4 min read
 Better Teams Moving to a Customer Centric Organisation Practical steps to shift from internal process obsession to genuine customer focus — in large, complex organisations.
3 min read
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Practices
OKRs, design sprints, retros & ways of working
6 editions
Practices Visualisation, Value Definition, Experimentation The three practices that underpin every high-performing product team — and how to introduce them without chaos.
4 min read
 Practices The Design Sprint: Solving Big Problems in Days, Not Months How Acend runs design sprints — and the team that solved their top NPS problem in 5 days.
5 min read
 Practices OKRs That Actually Work Most OKR implementations fail. Here's the pattern that makes them stick — and the mistakes that kill them.
4 min read
 Practices Quarterly Planning That Doesn't Waste Everyone's Time How the best teams use quarterly planning to align, prioritise and stay honest — in a day, not a week.
3 min read
 Practices Retrospectives That Actually Change Things The retro format most teams use produces conversation. Here's the format that produces change.
3 min read
 Practices Making Work Visible: The One Habit That Changes Everything When a team makes all their work visible, three things happen almost immediately. Here's what they are.
2 min read
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Principles
The Acend CFM model — Customer, Flow, Mindset
4 editions
Principles Improving Flow from Ideas to Outcomes The core principle behind every high-performing team — and why so few organisations have actually cracked it.
2 min read
 Principles Customers, Flow, Mindset: The Acend Triad The three principles Acend applies in every engagement — and why they always appear in this order.
3 min read
 Principles Value Action Over Advice Why Acend believes the best consultants are the ones who make themselves redundant — and how that shapes everything they do.
2 min read
 Principles Deliver Small. Learn Fast. Scale What Works. The experimentation principle that separates organisations that innovate from those that just talk about it.
3 min read

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