Category: Our posts for July 2017

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #102—shared with 10,204 peers—applauds Mr. Hodgson for pointing at the obvious: There is no Spotify Model — you have to figure out ‘agile’ within your organization yourself. And by the way, ‘agile’ does not mean Scrum either. Hubspot ditched it years ago and got it right nevertheless. We also learn how to break up silos in your organization, and why people outside the product trenches regular have trouble understanding what we are talking about.

We watch Melissa Perri warn us to fall for the feature factory trap, and we come to understand that ‘feature creep’ is merely a disguise for us failing to identify the core of our product, and we figure out how to identify our customers’ need and to reverse-engineer it into a product.

Lastly, we listen to Jeff Gothelf to learn how continuous innovation can become the center of an organization.

Have a great week!

Food for Thought’s issue #101—shared with 10,065 peers—focusses on how to get ‘agile’ to work in your organization. We learn that an old OSS manual on do-it-yourself organizational sabotage still sounds very familiar today. We then get advice on how C-level manager may become more agile, and why we should replace Taylorism’s mindset of command & control with trust.

We also listen to John Cutler explaining his feature factory concept and embrace the importance of mental models to improve the way we learn. Speaking of stepping up the game, you can do so, too, with your next set of A/B tests. Kevin Shanahan provides a step-by-step guide.

Finally, we follow Piyush Tantia when he describes a new way for engineering applications and human interactions: behavioral design.

Have a great week!

Food for Thought’s issue #100—shared with 9,957 peers—focusses on how to figure out what to build. We learn how to apply continuous product discovery, how to achieve product-market fit, how to use empathy mapping, and why a hypotheses backlog helps to avoid cluttering the product backlog.

We also discover Scrum misconceptions by analyzing job ads for scrum masters, and what cross-functional means with regard qualifications of individual team members. Moreover, we understand ways to improve your Kanban—by Mr. Scrum Jeff Sutherland himself—, and how the principles of the agile manifesto can be matched to change management.

Finally, there is an entertaining interview with Atlassian’s head of R&D on messiness, anarchy, structure, and what all of this has to do with creativity.

Have a great week!

Food for Thought’s issue #99—shared with 9,744 peers—deals with hiring scrum masters, why applying the theory of constraints improves the agile mindset, and why a passive-aggressive behavior is bad for business, and not just for your culture. We also learn how to deal with difficult stakeholders, and what the ‘mental model’ fuzz is all about.

On the product side, we understand the power of proper agile roadmaps for collaboration and communication across an organization, and how a successful lean and agile journey looks like. (Courtesy of Telia TV in Sweden.)

Finally, Sebastian Deterding, a research fellow at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York, challenges us to consider the moral dimensions of our work as product people in a beautifully narrated presentation from MTP Engage.

Have a great week!