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Our posts by Stefan Wolpers
Stefan—based in Berlin, Germany—has been working for 14-plus years as an agile coach, Scrum Master, and Product Owner. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org. He has developed B2C as well as B2B software, for startups as well as corporations, including a former Google subsidiary. Stefan curates the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and organizes the Agile Camp Berlin, a Barcamp for coaches and other agile practitioners.
What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. While they try to become more appealing to product and software developers, they still have difficulties understanding what it takes to build an attractive product/engineering culture. Learn more about typical anti-patterns and signs that an organization is causing a toxic team culture, impeding its efforts to become agile.
TL; DR: Virtual 25/10 Crowdsourcing, Innovation Theater — Food for Agile Thought #254
Welcome to the 254th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,836 peers. This week, we applaud David for creating a free virtual 25/10 Crowdsourcing app; we learn what happened to a thriving agile culture once the company laid off the agile folks. Also, we accept the necessity to avoid delays in the management decision process if our agile transition shall bear fruit.
We then lift the confusion over vision and mission and the question who is responsible for which; we delve into a favorite corporate pastime and browse a well-curated repository of templates for product people for new shiny things to support our journey to build great products.
Lastly, we listen in to a conversation on Wardley maps with — Simon Wardley.
TL; DR: Lipstick Agile — Happiness in the Trenches?
Have you noticed how many people in the agile field are unhappy with their work situation? A situation where an organization already struggles doing agile, not to mention ‘becoming agile?’ This is what I call lipstick Agile.
Scrum Masters and agile coaches are close to either burnout or indifference. Product Owners who “own” the product by name only, and developers questioning why “Agile” is imposed upon them and often turns out to be just another form of micromanagement.
TL; DR: Successful Change, Product Centricity Lessons — Food for Agile Thought #253
Welcome to the 253rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,802 peers. This week, we delve into successful change; we explore self-organization at scale, and we revisit the mantra of the two-pizza teams.
We then listen to the story of a product leader who has to move beyond ‘Agile’ & metrics; we pick up insights from a success story on transitioning to a product-driven organization, and we come back to the adage that ideas are worth nothing, only execution is.
Lastly, we consider whether regarding transitions as products would increase the chances of a successful change.
Creating an agile community of practice helps winning hearts and minds within the organization as it provides authenticity to the agile transition — signaling that the effort is not merely another management fad.
Read more to learn how to get your agile community going even without a dedicated budget and how to make it work with distributed teams.
TL; DR: Resolving Team Conflict, Ikigai & Cynefin — Food for Agile Thought #252
Welcome to the 252nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,787 peers. This week, we analyze options for resolving team conflict; we learn more about our team’s reason for being, and we think about how we are complicit in change fatigue.
We then advocate the unlearning of user stories, and we learn how to rejuvenate user growth by focusing on unlikely user groups. Moreover, we discover another five ways to tackle churn and improve retention.
Lastly, we embrace another help to get a hold on uncertainty and complexity with the Cynefin framework.
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