Food for Agile Thought’s issue #191—shared with 21,835 peers—asks if Agile is dead, features an epic article on the usefulness of Liberating Structures for Scrum Masters, and applauds Jeff for a handy card listing 45 rebuttals to claims that ‘Agile would not work.’
We also delve into the problem of blindly believing what your customers tell you when creating Product Backlogs. Moreover, we learn why everyone should participate in prototyping, and we reconsider whether we have been using dot voting correctly so far.
Lastly, we thank CollabNet VersionOne for publishing the 13th State of Agile Report.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #190—shared with 21,794 peers—focuses on agile budgeting — or why the industrial model of handling money is preventing companies from becoming agile —; we learn to distinguish between emergent architecture and architecture by chance, and we come back to technical debt once more.
We also embrace the idea of not harming people and our societies with new products. We learn more about visualizing experiments, and we abandon the idea of misusing the Sprint Planning for creating the perfect plan—control is an illusion.
Lastly, we enjoy Sam Harris Shane Parrish reflecting on mental models, decision making, and the tricks your mind is playing with you.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #189—shared with 21,739 peers—delves into agile maturity models or their uselessness, the original sin of applying Scrum for all the wrong reasons, and whether an organization is supposed to fire incumbent coders when moving to Scrum to ensure success.
Moreover, we analyze product strategy maturity—which is probably contradicting the notion of this week’s essential read—, why we should not bet the farm on ‘Agile’ to create successful products, and how to integrate UX with Scrum.
Lastly, we get a better understanding of what becoming agile means when legacy technology is involved.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #188—shared with 21,733 peers—delves into Scrum roots, the perils caused by a ubiquitous misconception of ‘Agile,’ and how to tackle typical organizational anti-patterns impeding the collaboration of multiple Scrum teams.
Moreover, we analyze the dark side of A/B testing, we learn about a new framework claiming to be able to predict the future success of new products, and we embrace the idea of the ‘Hero’s Journey’ to understand our users’ way of interacting with our applications better.
Lastly, we reflect on the lessons learned from WeWork’s CTO on how to scale technology and the organization simultaneously.
TL; DR: Liberating Structures for Scrum: The Sprint Retrospective
Liberating Structures Sprint Retrospective: A few weeks ago, I started an event series with my Berlin-based Hands-on Agile Meetup group on how to improve Scrum events utilizing Liberating Structures — a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team. The results have been fantastic so far, and I like to share these outcomes with those who cannot participate in person.
In this first post, learn more on how you can use Liberating Structures strings to improve the level of collaboration and engagement at Sprint Retrospectives.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #187—shared with 21,673 peers—focuses on whether the agile ROI is it scientifically provable, and that the longevity of agile teams is overrated. We also get first-hand insights into why a Holacracy project ultimately did not work out.
Moreover, we delve into flow and value in product development; we learn how to apply a proven product/market fit survey, and we learn how Marty Cagan assesses the skills and gaps of prospective product manager coachee. (Great food of thought for your career.)
🦖 Lastly, we enjoy a fantastic presentation on Cynefin, Dinosaurs, decision making under complexity, and under which circumstances innovation may flourish. (Kudos to Liz.)
