Category: Our posts by Stefan Wolpers

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of July 3rd, 2016—shared with 3,132 peers—starts with a video on how Spotify is scaling agile engineering, before we move on to dealing with problems of all kind: organizational debt, dysfunctional teams, and how to manage continuous delivery to legacy organizations.

We then explore the secrets of great teamwork, why movies like “Oceans 11” or “The Italian Job” can be watched for professional reasons, and how to scale the role of the product owner along the life-cycle of a product.

We also dive deep into the lean startup methodology, namely into “product/market fit” and the “minimum viable product”.

Last, but not least, we learn what basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain has to do with agile transition, and that solving problems with the tools at hand rather than inventing new solutions from scratch can be a license to print money. Have a great Sunday!

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of June 26th, 2016—shared with 3,010 peers—starts with a rant on Scrum slaves, aka Scrum masters being perceived as team secretaries, how to make people join the daily stand-ups joyfully, and preserve estimation accuracy over time. And still, when we talk about agile adoption the Borg way, resistance is futile.

We also explore a simple trick, how to plan for great retrospectives, utilizing Retromat to its full potential.

We dive deep into scaling lean product management with Ash Maurya, understand the importance of not falling for pleasing only your best customers and analyze the long-term product strategy of Mr. Musk.

Last, but not least, we enjoy Wally toying with the pointy-haired boss, and learn about Google’s epic undertaking of turning itself into “machine learning first” company. Have a great Sunday!

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of June 19th, 2016 provides the argument for agile autonomy and manager-free agile shops and lets Basecamp’s CEO explain that the noble purpose of leadership is to establish autonomy, not control. We learn that team happiness is overrated, and how to fix some prevailing Scrum master anti-patterns.

We also explore, why open office spaces may not spark creativity—it’s okay if you want your cubicle back—, but make sure, that everyone can steal your work anyway. Speaking of which: scaling is no excuse for losing your product mojo, and that the CEO turn back the clock and fight bureaucracy. (Listen to Nancy Duarte’s great story.)

Last, but not least, we learn about a framework that might turn brainstorming finally into something useful, and that going Lean works in large organizations, too. Finally, we enjoy The Atlantic’s portrait of Ev Williams of Medium and learn about AI and machine intelligence from Mr deep learning at a16z, Frank Chen. Have a great Sunday!

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of June 12th, 2016 provides insight in how large scale agile adoptions can go wrong — SAFe failure, so to speak —, how to take “dysfunction” out of cross-functional teams, and how to put mindset into the Agile Manifesto. Ever wondered, why Spotify is not descending into chaos? Read on.

We also explore five proven anti-pattern that will ruin velocity as a concept once and for all—a must-read for agile bean counters—, and we deal with the dreaded estimation idea. But wait, the news is not all negative. We learn, how information architecture can make sense of any product, and that customers putting trust in products is no miracle, but can actually be built into them.

Last, but not least, we look into the future: Do bots have to be kind all the time? And what, given that technological progress is inevitable, about the future of humans? Where will we be in 20 years from now? Kevin Kelly knows more about our destiny and shares it in an interview with Chris Dixon of a16z. Finally, we end the 45th edition with a great interview, starring Walt Mossberg and Jeff Bezos. Have a great Sunday!