Category: Our posts by Stefan Wolpers

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 22nd, 2017—shared with 6,173 peers—wants you to free your mind (and the agile rest will follow): Efficiency and creativity don’t make good companions, particularly if you have to resort to guerrilla innovation.

We also bust the myth that there are too many meetings in Scrum—the so familiar post-Scrum-honeymoon whining from developers.

We then dive deep into how to turn ideas into validated learnings and those into actionable user stories for the product backlog. By the way, given the abundance of ideas, you may consider learning how to say ‘no’ to create an outstanding product. Find out how to do so without burning bridges.

Last but not least: Learn how to intelligently fail while hacking the innovation culture of your organization—which is particularly useful if you are not working for Google, for example.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 15th, 2017—shared with 5,934 peers—celebrates 21 years of Scrum with Ken Schwaber and covers Product Owner patterns such as the part-time PO, or how to embed the PO more effectively into the Scrum team’s daily work.

We also learn that Holacracy can add purpose to organizations that use Scrum, and that Scrum even works well at home with four Lil’ Rascals.

We then dive deep into risk-mitigation and how to avoid product failure, and ask ourselves: “Is there a plural of priority?” (Yes, I know, a lot of product roadmaps pretend there is one…) So, why not learn storytelling with Christina Wodtke, and turn ‘priorities’ into ‘priority’ again?

Last but not least: A brand new, free ebook from Hands-on Agile covering 42 interview questions for the Product Owner role is available. You can download it right here.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 8th, 2017—shared with 5,703 peers—looks into agile transitions at scale: hybrid patterns, success stories, and principles of organizational design.

We learn that the Jira people discovered eight traits of successful teams and that getting to done requires a team to accept ownership and accountability.

We also revisit the product manager v. Product Owner debate and have a look at 2016 from the product management community perspective. Also, we learn about the hard-wired cave-man inside of us and what implications this has for product design.

Last but not least, Erin Griffith reports on the growing list of startup scandals, bordering on fraud. (Yub, my beloved Theranos is part of that article, too.)

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of December 18th, 2016—shared with 5,330 peers—looks back at this year’s product people and at the state of technology.

We also dive deep into how to create organizations based on agile teams, and what this has to do with creativity and keeping your competitive edge. We also ask: has today’s Scrum Master role become meaningless?

Marty Cagan no longer believes that the Product Owner is at the same time also the product manager, and Clay Christensen explains today’s recipe for innovation—conveniently delivered at the length of commute or a milkshake. Or both at the same time.

Enjoy a great holiday season—Food for Thought will be back on January 8th, 2017!