Adam Josephs of Celerity Consulting Group On Five Simple Rules That Can Accelerate & Optimize Product Development
1. Require clear, agreed-upon, and communicated accountabilities.
2. Prioritize activities and spending based on risk.
3. Engineer accountability, transparency, integrity, and commitment into your team’s culture.
4. Use the cost of being late to prioritize activities and spending.
5. Leverage cross-functional teams early to force changes up front
I had the pleasure of talking with Adam Josephs. Adam is the President and Founding Partner of Celerity Consulting Group Inc., a company renowned for its expertise in coaching high-tech, industrial, and software product companies to enhance productivity, grow revenues, and increase valuations. Based in New York City, Josephs has a distinguished career spanning over two decades, marked by significant roles at leading technology companies like Apple Computer and Microsoft, as well as various startups. His deep-rooted experience in engineering project management and product organization has positioned him as a respected figure in the field of product development and organizational change.
Adam’s journey into the tech industry began with his academic pursuits at Stanford University, followed by further studies at Oxford University’s Said Business School. His education laid a robust foundation for his subsequent roles in major tech firms. At Apple, Josephs managed engineering projects in system software, dealing with joint venture product development projects that required innovative approaches to team dynamics and project management. At Microsoft, he integrated internet functionality into existing products during the early days of the web. Returning to New York, Adam led teams at several pioneering internet startups, driving innovation and growth in the Web 1.0 era.
In 2000, Adam co-founded Celerity Consulting Group. Under his leadership, Celerity has become synonymous with the “Risk Up Front” methodology, a strategic approach emphasizing accountability, integrity, transparency, and commitment. This methodology is designed to identify and mitigate risks early in the development process, ensuring projects are delivered on time and meet quality standards.
Adam’s expertise is not confined to his consulting practice. He is also an accomplished educator, having taught entrepreneurship and strategy at prestigious institutions including New York University, UC Berkeley, Singularity University, and the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. His commitment to education extends to industry conferences, where he frequently shares insights and strategies with professionals from various sectors. His approach has been incorporated into academic and commercial start-up incubators.
Outside of his professional endeavors, Josephs is an avid rugby player and board game enthusiast. He is also a passionate advocate for local animal rescues, actively supporting organizations like Stray from the Heart, which works to save and rehabilitate stray and abandoned dogs.
Adam’s career is punctuated by significant experiences that shaped his approach to product development and team management. At Apple, he learned the importance of clear communication and setting up teams for success through well-defined agreements, a principle that became a cornerstone of his consulting practice. His time at Microsoft and various startups further enriched his understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the tech industry, allowing him to develop resilient and effective strategies for his clients.
A defining moment in Adam’s career was his decision to transition from an operating role to consulting. This move allowed him to refine and implement the “Risk Up Front” methodology, which simplifies the complex dynamics of high-performance teams into a set of straightforward principles and practices. These principles and practices identify risks and changes so they can be early in the project, leading to faster and more profitable team execution and product delivery. This approach has been widely recognized for its effectiveness in improving team performance and accelerating product delivery.
Adam’s philosophy centers on the importance of integrity and commitment in both professional and personal relationships. He believes that maintaining these principles leads to greater productivity and more reliable outcomes, even in the face of challenges. His commitment to these values is evident in his consulting work, where he emphasizes the need for clear accountability and transparent communication.
Throughout his career, Josephs has demonstrated a unique ability to blend academic rigor with practical experience, making him a sought-after consultant and educator in the field of product development and organizational change. His contributions to the tech industry and his dedication to fostering high-performance teams have left an indelible mark on the organizations he has worked with.
As Josephs continues to lead Celerity Consulting Group, his vision remains focused on helping companies navigate the complexities of product development and organizational change. His work not only drives business success but also inspires a culture of accountability, transparency, integrity and commitment in the teams he coaches, ensuring lasting positive impacts on their performance and growth.
It’s so good to see you again Adam! Before we dive in deep, I’d love to learn more about your personal origin story. Can you share the story of your childhood, how you grew up, and what brought you to this specific career path as a consultant?
Adam: Certainly! I was born and raised in New York City. I went out to California to attend Stanford. After Stanford, I worked for Apple and Microsoft, then came back to New York and did a few internet startups. In 2000, we founded Celerity Consulting. Celerity means speed in Latin. It’s where “accelerate” comes from, and the “c” is for the speed of light, as in E=mc².
That’s great. So, do you have any mentors or experiences that particularly influenced or inspired you in your approach to product development?
Adam: Absolutely. It first started at Apple when I was relatively young. I came in as an engineering project manager in system software. The portfolio I was given involved joint venture product development projects that Apple was doing with outside partners and contractors. Back in the ’90s, this was a new thing.
We had the dynamic, which you certainly see today, that when you’re coming from a world-class company like Apple — or Meta or Google — the smaller companies will fall over themselves to work with you. The problem is they often sign up for things they can’t possibly deliver, leading to big failures for everyone. Apple might think it’s going to get what it wants, but it’s critical to set up all the teams for success up front. Winning in court doesn’t help; the objective is to get the product out the door.
So, I quickly had to solve the problem of effective product development in an environment where the team is not all in one building.. This was even before the internet to some extent, so we had to create high-performance teams without relying on subliminal connections or the interactions that happen in person. Clear communication was essential, whether across a phone call, an email, or in different companies.
One of the seminal experiences I had at Apple was working with a project management guru named Ron LaFleur. He was a consultant and coach who had been part of the Skunk Works at Lockheed. He worked on a project to produce a ship capable of laying transatlantic cable. This ship needed world-class stability to lay the cable across the North Sea effectively and efficiently. He brought to Apple and other companies the concept of clear accountability and singular ownership, along with clear definitions and rigorous delineation of who is involved. These foundations had to be straightened out upfront.
After Apple, I went to Microsoft just as the internet got going, and later, I worked at several startups. In these environments, I leveraged my experience to get things done, even in the classic crazy environment of internet startups. I had some fun adventures there. I didn’t make a fortune, but going through three startups in two years builds resilience and offers a new perspective on job stability. These experiences were crucial in shaping my ability to be an effective consultant in a range of environments.
It’s been said that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a humorous mistake that you made when you were first starting consulting and the lesson you learned from it?
Adam: There are two stories I would share. I don’t know if they’re humorous, but in many ways, I’m very grateful I learned these lessons relatively early in my career.
One was about being naive. As a project manager, I had no problem standing up in meetings and literally pounding my shoe on the table about what should and needed to get done to set a particular project up for success. I didn’t have the burden of thinking like a senior manager about what was possible and all the constraints. We were signing explicit contracts with different companies, so I felt justified. For example, I would say, “If you cannot provide the resources for Apple to do its quality engineering upfront, then I don’t know how this can get done.” I had managing directors staring and talking to each other about not having the resources, and I’d be like, “Well, I don’t know how to do it; you need someone smarter.” My naivete and willingness to dive on my sword showed me that there is room to be straightforward with people, your teams, and your management about what is really necessary to get something done.
Another important anecdote for me as a consultant, and especially as a coach for management teams and project teams, is about being a trusted advisor. Early in my consulting career, I blew it. Someone had told me something confidentially about disagreeing with how something was getting done. In my next conversation with the CEO, I shared that along with other insights. The CEO, whom I had a long relationship with, got really agitated and demanded to know who said it, thinking it would help him understand the perspective. After trying to evade, I eventually revealed the source, thinking it would be constructive. Almost immediately, I realized that was inappropriate and out of integrity.
I got back in touch with the individual, admitted my mistake, and apologized. The person was understandably horrified. This experience taught me the importance of maintaining confidentiality. From then on, I understood that my role is to be an opaque communicator. This has been especially helpful when working with investors and venture capitalists. When introduced to their portfolio companies, we make it clear that we do not work for the board or the investor. We are hired, paid, and fired by the operating company. If a VC I have a long relationship with asks how things are going in a client company, my response is “great,” and that’s the end of the conversation. They know I need to maintain that level of confidentiality to be effective in the companies I’m working with. This principle remains one of the most important tenets I still uphold.
What do you feel have been your career-defining moments so far? We would love to hear the lead-up, what happened, and how it impacted your subsequent career.
Adam: When I decided to move from an operating company to consulting, I worked with someone who had been consulting for a while. He asked me to join him as a partner. At that time, our work with companies included a whole list of good practices — everything from “fail early and often” to “do early testing” to “focus on what the customer needs, not what they’re asking for.” All good stuff. But it was a couple of years later, when we founded Celerity, that I realized we could cut through that.
Understanding best practices is very useful, but the methodology we created in “Risk Up Front” is straightforward: four principles, four pieces of paper, and two meetings. It’s that simple. When we teach a workshop, it’s mostly about the principles. If you don’t get integrity, accountability, transparency, and commitment straight in your culture and teams, then just adding more exercises or paperwork is just one more thing to be out of integrity.
We worked hard and refined these principles with strict definitions. In our world, accountability is the singular ownership of a result. Transparency means everyone on the project knows exactly what state the project is in, and you err on the side of over-communication. Integrity is simply doing what you said you would. Commitment is not just about trying hard or doing your best effort. t. It’s about saying, “It will be so, even in the face of circumstances.Am I ready to bet the business on getting it done.”
One key aspect of commitment with that definition is that it forces risk identification. When this becomes part of the culture, people pause and think about, “What is the date that everyone can depend on?” If they’re not committed, the next conversation is about what is in the way of committing. The list of reasons are themselves both issues and risks. We have many more options to take action on those risks or issues at the time of committing, rather than finding out a week later that something didn’t get done because we needed a piece of information and the person responsible went on vacation.
If we could patent one thing about Risk Up Front, it would be the relationship between upgraded conversations for commitment and early, robust risk identification.
What do you do to stay on top of market trends and developments in the product management space?
Adam: Well, because we’ve worked very hard to dig into the fundamental dynamics of making high-performance teams, I’m a bit of a frustrated academic myself. I love diving into the literature, but we operate from some basic principles of complex adaptive teams and sense-making. What does it take to get human beings to get stuff done despite their own humanity? Our core messages, tools, and tricks haven’t changed much in terms of getting teams to execute effectively.
That said, we have the joy of working with a wide range of companies. We are agnostic about the industries our clients are in. I probably spend a third of my time in computer hardware and software, including everything from fintech to consumer electronics. Another third is what we like to call “high high-tech,” encompassing semiconductor, chemical, material science, and biotech sectors. The remaining third covers random other industries, from Goldman Sachs to a startup exec who got elected to Congress and asked us to work with his team.
Our core approach focuses on creating high-performance teams quickly in complex and risky environments, whether technical, market, or organizational. This approach applies universally, even to a congressional office that actually wants to get things done. This variety of experiences feeds our understanding of what our clients need and gives us resilience against passing fads, whether it’s the latest software or a particular tool structure.
We often work with Agile teams, and those of us in the industry know that Agile has great principles, structures, and practices at its core. However, it’s often not implemented as well as it was designed. We get to cut through that and say, “You’re doing Agile? Great. Let’s tune it up so it actually works. .” As one of our clients described, we’re the sriracha sauce you splash on top that actually helps the teams and processes get things done faster and more reliably.
Based on your experience and research, can you share your five simple rules that can accelerate or optimize product development?
Adam: Fair enough. If I had to come up with a list of five rules, I would say this.
1.. First, echoing Ron LeFlore all the way down to our work today, is clear accountability. Over half the issues we see on projects are due to unclear, ambiguous, and poorly communicated accountabilities. You want to invest upfront to get those clear for everyone because it’s much cheaper to sort that stuff out early rather than waiting until you have breakdowns. When things don’t get done or there are fights over who does what or who makes what decision late in the project, it’s much harder.
Accountability is singular ownership of a result. One name. They may do none of the “work” on the particular deliverable themselves, but they are accountable for ensuring it gets done. I’m going to share one foundational story that shaped our view on accountability. It goes back to Aristotle’s Physics. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, described how leaves fall off the tree because branches move due to the wind blowing. You trace that back in a causal chain to that which moves itself, and Aristotle calls it a prime mover. We want people who have accountability to view themselves as the prime mover. Their job is to make sure that everything happens to cause that deliverable or decision to happen.
This operates on the micro level too. For example, if no one knows who’s going to schedule a meeting, just cause the meeting to get scheduled. This applies to executives and project leaders as well. Their job is to ensure everything necessary happens for a project, or even a business, to be successful.
There’s a pitfall here where sometimes accountability is given strictly as a function of subject matter expertise. That can be a trap. Certainly, things at the level of a project or organization require world-class expertise and execution in areas where the singular owner might not have that expertise. If they think, “Well, I’m only leading because I’m a great hardware engineer, and I don’t know anything about marketing,” then what happens is the hardware gets taken care of, but other crucial areas don’t. You need someone accountable at the level of cross-functional activity, ensuring that marketing, software, DevOps, and support are all brilliant. That’s why accountability should be about the causal role, not just being the tech lead.
2. The second rule that I want everyone in the company to focus on is risk-focused prioritization. Our core theory is that project activities, which have beginnings, ends, and measurable goals, can get derailed by late changes. This is what we call “risk upfront,” and it’s akin to the common “shift left” approach. We’ve been pushing our clients to prioritize risk early for about 20 years, encouraging them to address urgent activities upfront where it’s less expensive.
Human nature often works against this, as we tend to be optimistic procrastinators. It’s like staying up until three in the morning to finish a problem set in a university and promising ourselves we’ll start sooner next time.
One of our principles is that knowing what to do doesn’t always translate to actually doing it. If knowledge alone were enough, we’d all be at the gym more often. Understanding this, we need irresistible structures and practices that force upfront investment. It’s not just about working smarter; it’s about shifting where you spend your resources and what you choose to do.
In today’s world, where timeframes are shorter, and everything seems urgent, making decisions on what to prioritize can be challenging. While there are many models like story points and customer value, we believe in focusing on what’s riskiest. Engage a cross-functional team to hunt for blind spots — the things you don’t even know you need to worry about. Identifying these risks upfront leads to faster projects and better execution.
For example, even in Agile methodologies, adding a risk evaluation column to your product backlog can be beneficial. Our recommendation for prioritizing risks is straightforward. You need four buckets:
a. Super High Risk: Stuff no one has ever done. Like, we’ve been to the moon, but we haven’t been to Mars.
b. High Risk: Things someone has done, but we haven’t. It might seem easy, but without internal experience, the risk is higher.
c. Medium Risk: Things we do but aren’t perfect at, and it’s not a core competency.
d. Low Risk: Things that are core competencies.
It’s critical to make it easy for folks to report whatever is on their mind. For instance, if a team member believes that the mediocre food in the cafeteria may affect team performance, allow it on the risk list. If the team feels comfortable submitting “quality of food” risks, then you likely have a robust culture of risk identification. If there’s room to voice concerns about the food, then you’re likely hearing about important medium-level risks that might otherwise go unreported.
Once you have identified and prioritized risks, allocate resources to address the top priority items first. In Scrum sprints, for example, I want to see exploratory spikes in the initial sprints rather than two-thirds into the project when it’s often too late to address them effectively.
3 . The third thing is to look at the foundational principles: accountability, transparency, integrity, and commitment. These principles are at the core of our work, and it’s about engineering them into the culture and operationalizing them in everyday activities. This isn’t about getting better posters for the lobby with inspirational words.
Accountability means singular ownership of a result. Transparency ensures everyone on the project has the same understanding of the activity’s status, and we err on the side of over-communication. Integrity means doing what we said we would do. Commitment is about making it happen, even in the face of challenges. Identifying potential obstacles early gives you more opportunities to address them before they become bigger issues.
4 . The fourth key factor to prioritize iis the cost of delay or being late. When you’re trying to decide what needs to be prioritized, it’s not just about identifying great opportunities. How you resource these opportunities will impact how quickly and successfully they are executed the first time. In a world of scarce resources, if you’re wondering where to spend money, look at where delays would be most expensive.
For example, in IT organizations or software, if a project overlaps the fiscal year, you might end up extending the use of an existing system for another year, which could be costly. In consumer electronics, if you don’t complete a project in time to get it on the Best Buy or Amazon product list for the holidays, you’ve missed a significant opportunity. Therefore, it makes sense to invest additional resources to reduce the probability of missing those key expensive deadlines.
Additionally, breaking customer commitments or dealing with products with a limited functional life can be very costly. Every month a product is delayed is one less month at the back en where it can generate steady profits and achieve its ROI.
Having these conversations upfront forces a higher level of rigor and understanding in your business case and understanding. It’s also a brilliant way to map the strategy and core business plan to day-to-day project decisions. Instead of just presenting cool slides at an all-hands meeting, you provide your teams with clear bullet points that highlight what’s at stake. Often, when you do the math, the stakes are much higher than initially thought, making this information valuable.
With this insight, you can execute consistently as long as you have the structures, practices, and support in place.
5. The one last thing I would say is that you’ve got to leverage the cross-functional team. Sometimes, in Scrum environments, people don’t know how to do that because Scrum is optimized for engineering teams with great communication. What we find is that engineering teams wonder, “What are all these people doing in our daily stand-up?” Marketing is there because they have no other place to really get a handle on what’s going on.
You want all the functions necessary to achieve profit for a particular activity involved upfront in a set of structures, practices, and rituals. This ensures everyone is anchored in the same business context. It’s all about customer value and what it takes to deliver that profitably. You’re leveraging the entire cross-functional team’s insight into why a project may fail, even when you don’t think they have anything interesting to say. We love having legal or HR involved in these conversations because the key to getting ahead of late changes is understanding the blind spots where the team has no idea where the biggest risks lie. You must have a very low bar and actively solicit risk identification from all corners.
This is why asking, “Does anyone have any risks?” can leave blind spots hidden. . You’re going to hear from the same folks you always hear from, while others stay silent. Everyone just wants to get back to their desk or their work. This dynamic is even more insidious in the world of global teams, where not everyone is a native English speaker, let alone with remote teams on Zoom. The more we reduce the bandwidth, the more we need engineered conversations that solicit early risk identification.
We like questions like, “Okay, everyone, what are your two most likely reasons this project will fail?” In risk identification upfront, there’s a specific language game we call cause and effect. You clearly state the existing condition that leads to your concern. For example, instead of just saying the house may be on fire, you would say, “The house has hundred-year-old wiring. The effect may be that it catches fire, and the impact is that we may have no place to live.” This method helps solicit risks from a 30 or 40-person team, which is some of the work that we do.
Please remember the following points:
1. Require clear, agreed-upon, and communicated accountabilities.
2. Prioritize activities and spending based on risk.
3. Engineer accountability, transparency, integrity, and commitment into your team’s culture.
4. Use the cost of being late to prioritize activities and spending.
5. Leverage cross-functional teams early to force changes up front.
What do management teams need to change or address to support the ideas you mentioned?
Adam: Well, you know, you hear this from change consultants across the board. The foundation is that there has to be commitment at the appropriate senior management level. By commitment, I don’t mean just showing up and giving the kickoff speech. I mean reallocating resources to support the change. That is where, frankly, most organizations fail.
We’re very sensitive to this, and we have a mantra that we will never let our clients talk us into something we don’t believe is workable. Even before the contract or agreement is signed, we want to ensure that you are ready to commit. Unfortunately, those conversations often don’t happen. It is actually less expensive for a huge corporation to authorize a couple hundred thousand in training, which is just a rounding error compared to the types of changes and investments needed.
Management teams need to decide if they are committed to the change they are advocating or funding and ensure they follow through. I recommend that senior leaders be involved in the training, especially when implementing any kind of change, like these five principles or something like Agile. CEOs should make sure their staff attends the training, and ideally, they should participate in some of the training as well. Everyone needs to understand the rules, whether you’re coaching, managing, or playing.
At a minimum, ensure that the management team practices the distinctions being taught and can incorporate them into their conversations, mapping them to necessary business objectives. Ask what your teams need for support and provide that support and resources. If resources are constrained, trim the list of changes you plan to implement. “Do less sooner” is one of our other mantras, and we encourage teams to adopt that.
The path to hell is paved with prioritized project lists where items four, five, and six never get done because you’re pretending to resource items seven, eight and nine. We prefer lists with a solid line above and below the line. If a project is below the line, it gets no resources, stays in investigation, or receives minimal attention. Management teams should be clear about what they are committed to funding to succeed and operate consistently with that. Communicate any changes clearly to the organization, and listen to yoru teams..
This will be our final question, an aspirational one. Adam, because of your great work and the platform you’ve built, you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most good to the most people, what would that be?
Adam: I come back to our principles because they’re the foundation not only of performance in business environments but also of all our relationships. As long as we’re dealing with human beings, those situations and dynamics are very similar. I would say, start with integrity. Be responsible for what you’re promising and hold yourself accountable to deliver on that promise. That’s what people around you expect.
For example, if you promise to take the garbage to the curb on Sunday night, it should be out by then, even if the garbage truck doesn’t come until Monday morning. There’s value in doing what you say you’ll do. Now, you also need to keep your sense of humor because there’s a paradox here. When you make a promise, you need to feel committed to it. Be judicious about what you promise. It makes a world of difference in workability.
There is a paradox of upgraded commitment. One side of the paradox is that at the time of a promise you need to mean it. However, the other side is that not everything you commit to in life will get done. But rather than using that as an excuse to avoid commitments., our firm belief is that playing the game where promises and integrity matter leads to more getting done.
Adam, it’s been amazing talking to you. How can our readers continue to follow your work, engage your services, and support you?
Adam: Well, give me a call! We love going old-fashioned. The basic way to get our information is on our website, [www.celerityconsulting.com]). You can also find our book, “Risk Up Front: Managing Projects in a Complex World,” on Amazon and other bookstores or visit https://celerityconsulting.com/ruf-book-store. I always love connecting with people on LinkedIn, so you can find me, Adam Josephs, at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjosephs, there. I look forward to hearing from you.
Interviewer: Adam, it’s been wonderful talking to you. I wish you continued success.
Adam: Thank you so much, my pleasure.
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