Category: Our posts for February 2017

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 26th, 2017—shared with 6,488 peers—focuses on brilliant jerks and the havoc they cause on culture. You may have heard of Susan Fowler and her working “experience” as a software engineer at Uber. The case is symptomatic of everything that goes wrong when building a truly inclusive, non-discriminating—and thus innovative—culture is sabotaged by the leadership.

On the product side, we dive deep into slicing & dicing of user stories, how to up your prototyping game, twelve lessons learned about product/market fit, and your organization has to scale the product team.

Last but not least: New kinds of work require new ideas—and new ways of organizing work altogether. The New York Times Magazine has more on it.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 19th, 2017—shared with 6,371 peers—focuses on how to create agile tribes by building great teams in a simple yet compelling framework, and thus overcome the waterfall legacy of established organizations.

We also dive deep into how to identify the right product, product increment, or feature: from hypotheses, via validation, to delivery.

Last but not least: We learn that failure itself is no longer an option but the goal. That the fear of failure is the enemy of innovation, and how the universal income thus might help becoming more innovative. (Star Trek. Finally.)

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 12th, 2017—shared with 6,242 peers—focuses on the agile enterprise: from where the return on investment is, via balancing autonomy and accountability at Spotify, to being agile with distributed teams.

We also dive deep into product discovery and its evolution over the last 20 years, why large teams tend to fail on building great products, and why product roadmaps are still a nascent trend.

Last but not least: We enjoy the transcript of the Slack AMA with Spotify’s former VP of Product, and we silently enjoy browsing this week’s Dilbert comics.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 5th, 2017—shared with 6,508 peers—focuses on team building, how to provide feedback to hardly bearable teammates, and why radical candor is good for business and your soul. Be warned, though, transparency has a dark side, too.

We also dive deep into how the best product teams evolve beyond Agile and Lean, how to utilize guerilla research to create excellent products, and what anti-patterns to avoid if you are pursuing a career in product management.

Last but not least: We discuss patterns and ethics of how today’s technology seeks to manipulate us.