TL; DR: Fake Agile, Social Systems — Food for Agile Thought #257
Welcome to the 257th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,957 peers. This week, we delve into fake Agile; we revisit the discussion on whether it is beneficial to estimate agile projects and listen to tips & tricks on how to stay united when distributed as a team.
We then turn to fundamental prioritization issues; we follow a live validation of a business idea by the two leading experts of this subject and pick up a few tricks from a recognized product mensch.
Lastly, we applaud Christiaan for his in-depth overview of social systems and the change question.
Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.
At the team level, qualitative agile metrics often work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.
TL; DR: Evolutionary Design, Product-Market-Fit — Food for Agile Thought #256
Welcome to the 256th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,912 peers. This week, we talk about the advantages of evolutionary design; we delve into predictability, and we promise to improve on estimating.
We then explore where news ideas originate, pointing at the apparent anti-patterns simultaneously; we talk money in product management, and we come back to outcome-driven business impacts.
Lastly, we applaud Jerome Kehrli for an epic guide on how to achieve product-market-fit.
TL; DR: Serendipity-Driven Innovation, Biases at Work — Food for Agile Thought #255
Welcome to the 255th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,874 peers. This week, we embrace serendipity-driven innovation; we analyze the secret work of cognitive biases, and we delve deeper into Amazon’s “disagree but commit” principle.
We then figure out how to lift the collaboration between product and engineering to the next level; we enjoy product leadership lessons from the UK’s Ministry of Justice digital team, and we promise to replace old-fashioned product requirement documents.
Lastly, we consider creating a user manual for ourselves to improve communication with our teammates.
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.
