TL; DR: Team Dynamics Guide — Food for Agile Thought #472
Welcome to the 472nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,871 peers. This week, Andy Cleff shares a team dynamics guide for fostering team harmony and growth, while Jeff Sutherland predicts an AI-driven Agile future where adaptability is essential. Maarten Dalmijn challenges Scrum evangelism to promote pragmatic expertise, Pim de Morree spotlights Bayer’s shift to self-management, and we dissect leadership anti-patterns that undermine product team empowerment.
Next, James Hawkins highlights PostHog’s engineer-product manager collaboration model, while Aakash Gupta interviews Thibault Louis-Lucas on breaking product norms for SaaS success. Jonny Longden advocates dynamic resourcing to drive innovation, and Christina Wodtke emphasizes continuous reflection across product lifecycles to balance growth, adaptability, and sustainable success.
Lastly, Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel explore extreme constraints as a driver of innovation, while Will Larson delves into Wardley Mapping for engineering strategy. Ben Popper and Eran Yahav examine AI coding tools’ benefits and risks, Iccha Sethi links engineering metrics to business outcomes, and Benedict Evans presents 2025’s tech trend: “AI Eats the World.”
🎓 January 27, 2025: The Advanced Product Backlog Management Course for Just $99!
👉 Please note:
- The course includes membership in my former professional students’ brand-new Hands-on Agile community.
- The course will only be available for sign-up until February 3, 2025!
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🏆 The Tip of the Week
: A Field Guide to Team Dynamics and Conflict
Andy Cleff offers tools, patterns, and practices to navigate team dynamics, fostering harmony, productive conflict, and growth while empowering teams to evolve through observation, experimentation, and systemic change.
🍋 Lemon of the Week
: Scrum’s Definition of Done Is Polishing Plates in a Burning Kitchen
The author argues Scrum’s Definition of Done is the villain behind poor quality, ignoring that it’s a collaborative tool, not a scapegoat for broken processes. Go and blame the tool, not lousy leadership!
➿ Agile & Leadership
: Is Agile Dead? How AI and Extreme Agile Redefine Work
Jeff Sutherland predicts a future where Agile, enhanced by AI, becomes indispensable across all industries. Traditional approaches will no longer suffice, and those who fail to adapt will lose their economic agency.
: "Why Do You Criticize Scrum, When You Wrote a Whole Book on Sprint Goals?"
Maarten Dalmijn defends criticizing Scrum despite writing a Sprint Goals book, advocating for agnostic expertise over evangelism to foster learning, results, and nuanced application of Agile practices.
(via Corporate Rebels): 📺 How Bayer Is Transitioning 100,000 People to Self-Management
Pim de Morree shares a webinar with Bayer leaders discussing their bold transformation of 100,000 employees from traditional hierarchy to self-management, highlighting insights on shared ownership and organizational agility.
🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — December 18-19, 2024
Discover Scrum’s four success principles in this official Scrum.org Advanced Scrum Master training class, which includes the industry-recognized PSM II certification. The PSM II training class is designed as a live virtual class and will be in English.
Enjoy the benefits of a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 CET.
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — December 18-19, 2024.
Customer Voice: “Dear Stefan, Thanks a lot for two intense and mindblowing days. Your way of teaching suites me perfectly. I must admit that all the positive feedback you have gotten is spot on! I would any time a day recommand your class to a Scrum Master who wants to add a whole new level to his/her scrum game. To all of you reading this. You have to experience Stefans class to understand how good it is.” (Source.)
🎯 Product
(via PostHog): Product Management Is Broken. Engineers Can Fix It
James Hawkins shares PostHog’s redefined engineer-product manager dynamic, empowering engineers with product ownership, autonomy, and speed while PMs act as strategic enablers, providing context, insights, and accountability loops.
: 🎙 How Tibo Sold over $10M in SaaS Products by Breaking All the Rules of Traditional Product Building
Aakash Gupta interviews Thibault Louis-Lucas on breaking traditional product rules, rapid validation, monetization as proper validation, building in public, and leveraging influencer partnerships to scale SaaS products to multimillion-dollar success—“Ship first, think later. Tech doesn’t matter. Users don’t have to be happy.”
: Continuous Reflection: Driving Success Across the Product Lifecycle
Christina Wodtke emphasizes continuous reflection across the product lifecycle—Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exit—to align products with reality, optimize growth, and balance portfolios for sustainable success and adaptability.
: Experimental Product Management Demands a New Approach to Resourcing
Jonny Longden argues that traditional fixed teams and rigid roadmaps stifle innovation in product management, advocating for dynamic resourcing, flexible teams, and probabilistic planning to embrace actual experimentation.
📯 Product Team Empowerment Anti-Patterns
Leadership anti-patterns often undermine product team empowerment — an essential success factor in Marty Cagan’s product operating model. These failures include micromanagement, overly rigid constraints, conflicting stakeholder demands, informal power struggles, and inadequate tools.
Learn more about addressing these challenges by redefining success, aligning incentives, fostering alignment, and balancing autonomy with standardization.
Learn more: Product Team Empowerment Anti-Patterns.
📅 Hands-on Agile 2025 Is Here — Join 500-plus Peers: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility
I am thrilled to announce that Hands-on Agile 2025 is officially on the horizon and will be free to attend from February 4-6, 2025. This time, we will focus on how Agile needs to evolve from concept-based agility to context-based agility.
But before we discuss what that means, let’s take a step back and consider why Hands-on Agile 2025 is going to be a can’t-miss event for everyone in the agile community.
For those unfamiliar, Hands-on Agile isn’t just another conference. It’s an event built around the Barcamp model, meaning it’s a self-organized, community-driven gathering with one goal: Sharing knowledge and experiences.
From February 4 to 6, 2025, we will spend three energizing days engaging in sessions, practicing agile games, sharing war stories, and learning directly from each other. Hands-on Agile is all about creating a space for practitioners, coaches, leaders, and newcomers to connect in a truly hands-on way.
Save Your Seat Now!
There are no tickets; Hands-on Agile 2025 is free.
However, you will need to register nevertheless. Otherwise, you would not receive, for example, the invitation to the HoA2025 community or have access to individual session access credentials:
Please note:
- For technical reasons, your sign-up confirmation will be sent from stefan [at] age-of-product.com.
- Your registration to Hands-on Agile 2025 will also subscribe you to Stefan’s Food for Agile newsletter, one of the largest independent newsletters on agile practices worldwide.
- Your invitation to join the Hands-on Agile 2025 community will be limited to February 28, 2025.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
and : 🎙 Gun to Your Head
Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel discuss how extreme constraints, inspired by Grant Slatton’s article, can drive creative problem-solving and radically different solutions in software development, exploring tools like Toyota Kata and Oblique Strategies.
: Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping.
Will Larson reflects on learning Wardley Mapping, exploring its practical applications for engineering strategy, emphasizing iterative mapping, and leveraging tools like Mapkeep to clarify and evolve strategic thinking.
(via Stack Overflow): 🎙 Even High-Quality Code Can Lead to Tech Debt
Ben Popper and Eran Yahav explore how AI coding tools boost productivity, aid junior developers, and raise concerns about quality, security, and how even great code can create technical debt.
(via Medium): Tying Engineering Metrics to Business Metrics
Iccha Sethi connects engineering metrics like uptime and deployment frequency to business goals like ARR and GRR, highlighting how aligning lagging and leading indicators drives customer retention and revenue growth.
🎶 Encore
: AI eats the world
Benedict Evans explores macro tech trends in his 2025 presentation, highlighting “AI Eats the World,” delivered as a keynote at the Slush conference in Helsinki.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning, for example, about PM Tools:
- Hands-on Agile 64: Mastering Work Intake: The Key to Sustainability and Flow with Jeremy Willets and Tom Cagley.
- 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 EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn About the Team Dynamics Guide — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.
If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
Help your team to learn about Disruptive Innovation by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
