TL; DR: Bringing Problems to Leaders — Food for Agile Thought #461
Welcome to the 461st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,821 peers. This week, Ant Murphy advocates for bringing problems to leaders to foster collaboration and empathy over the ‘don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions’ mindset, while Melissa Perri critiques Paul Graham’s ‘Founder Mode,’ urging founder CEOs to balance vision with scalable strategies. Murray Robinson, Shane Gibson, and William Malek explore Haier’s decentralized operating model, and Shane Hastie and Declan Whelan emphasize the importance of technical health and Agile practices. Chris Matts critiques escalations, highlighting their role in reinforcing dysfunctional leadership, and a deep dive explores the perils of Founder Mode’s micromanagement and lack of transparency.
Next, Peter Yang addresses the growing negativity towards product managers, offering ten actionable insights to regain respect. Also, in conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Camille Fournier discusses platform engineering frustrations and tips for new managers. Rohan Dehal explores how business models shape product strategy, focusing on aligning user needs with business goals, and Andrew Chen critiques common startup pivots, urging founders to prioritize refining their core product and targeting top users for success.
Lastly, John Cutler highlights three models—capability trees, customer journeys, and growth loops—that prevent siloed thinking in product development. At the same time, Maarten Dalmijn urges teams to prioritize value over timelines, Bandan Jot Singh critiques NPS, advocating for real-time sentiment analysis in D2C companies, and Paweł Huryn shares 12 key sources for product discovery. Finally, Jason Cohen explores the accuracy of crowd wisdom in objective scenarios but warns against its stifling effect on innovation in creative work.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Bringing Problems to Leaders
: Great Leaders Think ‘Bring Problems, Let’s Find a Solution Together’
Ant Murphy argues against the ‘don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions’ mindset, advocating instead for leaders to foster collaboration, empathy, and a safe space for surfacing problems to find better solutions together.
🍋 Lemon of the Week
: Why Scrum is Stressing You Out
The author claims Scrum sprints are the root of all developer stress, missing the basic principle of sustainable pace. By ignoring the flexibility and autonomy Scrum offers, he somehow turns it into a never-ending treadmill of misery. Perhaps next time, he should first learn what Scrum is actually about instead of blaming it outright.
➿ Agile & Leadership
: My thoughts on "Founder Mode" and why it's dangerous
Melissa Perri critiques Paul Graham’s ‘Founder Mode,’ emphasizing the need for founder CEOs to balance vision with scalable strategy and trust experienced leaders as companies grow beyond the startup phase.
and : 🎙 The Haier model with William Malek
Murray Robinson, Shane Gibson, and William Malek discuss Haier’s decentralized operating model, where 5,700 micro-enterprises use internal marketplaces, smart contracts, and value-added mechanisms to drive innovation and optimize performance.
: Failureship and Escalations
Chris Matts critiques escalations in organizations, arguing they reinforce dysfunctional leadership, disrupt processes, and validate senior executives’ power rather than addressing root causes like poor planning and risk management.
and (via InfoQ): 🎙 Engineering Excellence: Declan Whelan on Technical Health, Agile Practices, and Team Culture
Shane Hastie and Declan Whelan discuss technical health, DORA metrics, Agile practices, and team culture, emphasizing the importance of continuous delivery, observability, and long-term service stewardship in modern software development.
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🎯 Product
: Why Is Everyone Hating on Product Managers?
Peter Yang reflects on the growing negativity toward product managers and offers ten actionable insights to regain respect, including cutting product management theater, designing better incentives, and focusing on building customer-facing products.
and : 🎙 The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand
In this pod with Lenny Rachitsky, Camille Fournier, author of The Manager’s Path, shares insights on platform engineering, including what frustrates engineers about PMs, how to avoid major rewrites, and tips for new managers and platform teams.
: Business Models as Product Strategy: A Deep Dive
Rohan Dehal emphasizes how business models shape product strategy, exploring how freemium, subscription and other models create incentives that drive development decisions, offering insights on aligning user needs with business goals.
: Unfortunate startup pivots (a short list)
Andrew Chen outlines common startup pivots that often fail, urging founders to focus on specific, actionable pivots like refining their core product or targeting top users.
📯 Founder Mode: The Dark Side of a Hyped Model
This article delves into the darker aspects of Founder Mode, popularized by Paul Graham and others. It offers a critical perspective for agile practitioners, product leaders, startup founders, and managers who embrace this paradigm and probably fall victim to survivorship bias; the Jobs and the Cheskys are the exception, not the rule.
The article explores how resulting tendencies, such as micromanagement, lack of strategic transparency, team devaluation, and reckless risk-taking, can undermine organizational health, stifle innovation, and conflict with agile principles. These can jeopardize long-term success while making work in organizations with a failed founder mode application miserable for everyone below the immediate leadership level and the founder himself.
Learn more: Founder Mode: The Dark Side of a Hyped Model.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
: Trees, Journeys, and Loops (and the Functional Model Trap)
John Cutler highlights three key models—capability trees, customer journeys, and growth loops—that help cross-functional teams avoid siloed thinking, promote collaboration, and prevent the ‘functional model trap’ in product development.
: Why Estimates and Timelines Are the Biggest Enemy to Delivering Value
Maarten Dalmijn argues that obsessive focus on estimates and timelines hinders value delivery, urging teams to prioritize product quality and ensure they move in the right direction before accelerating.
: Net Promoter Score is a scam, here's an alternative.
Bandan Jot Singh critiques the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and advocates for real-time sentiment analysis as a more comprehensive alternative for measuring customer experience, particularly in large-scale direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies.
: 12 Proven Sources of Insights to Fuel Your Product Discovery
Paweł Huryn shares 12 proven sources to fuel product discovery, emphasizing customer interviews, data analytics, stakeholder insights, and benchmarking as essential tools for innovation and maximizing impact in product management.
🎶 Encore
(via Jason Cohen): Ignoring the Wisdom of Crowds
Jason Cohen explores the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ demonstrating its accuracy in objective scenarios like guessing jellybeans, but warns that crowds can stifle innovation by vetoing unique ideas in creative work.
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📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning, for example, about Bringing Problems to Leaders:
- Hands-on Agile 62: From Backlog Manager to Product Manager with David Pereira.
- Hands-on Agile 61: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz.
- Hands-on Agile 59: Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman.
- Hands-on Agile 57: Humble Planning with Maarten Dalmijn.
- Hands-on Agile 53: An Agile Coaches Guide to Storytelling with Bob Galen.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
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