Are we losing sight of what truly matters in Agile? The future isn’t about rigidly adhering to or outright dismissing frameworks like Scrum or SAFe. Instead, it’s about returning to the fundamental principles — the Agile Primitives — that genuinely empower teams to adapt, innovate, and deliver real value. By refocusing on these core elements, organizations can move beyond mere methodological compliance and embrace authentic agility.
Dive in to explore how the Agile community is coming full circle, rediscovering the essence that made Agile transformative in the first place.
TL; DR: Enabling Agility — Food for Agile Thought #462
Welcome to the 462nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,839 peers. This week, Nick van der Meulen explores how enabling agility in large organizations works by empowering teams through four decision rights guardrails. Itamar Gilad examines decision-making challenges, advocating for decentralization and context-sharing, while Petra Wille and Elias Lieberich offer strategies for optimizing team topologies to enhance flow and productivity. Also, Willem-Jan Ageling highlights how organizational culture often undermines the autonomy promised by Agile principles, and Pim de Morree discusses how self-managing organizations, functioning as dynamic networks, drive innovation and adaptability.
Next, Marcus Castenfors warns against giving too much autonomy too soon during product transformations, highlighting the need for clear leadership and team competence. Maarten Dalmijn challenges the traditional view of requirements, emphasizing the need to anchor them in actual needs, and Saeed Khan advises against chasing feature parity with competitors, advocating instead for market-driven, value-differentiated product strategies. Moreover, Afonso Franco calls for viewing cross-functional teams as a unified discipline, focusing on collective jobs-to-be-done to enhance collaboration and reduce siloed thinking.
Lastly, Doc Norton shares his take on Opportunity Solution Trees, emphasizing collaborative problem-solving and iterative experimentation for achieving outcomes. Wes Kao offers practical advice on delivering bad news effectively, focusing on clarity, avoiding blame, and maintaining agency. Additionally, Melissa Perri explores the role of Product Ops, addressing key pillars, scaling, and the skills essential for a CPO, and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, shares insights on his journey from coder to tech leader, discussing cultural contrasts, coding, and retail’s future with VR and AI. Finally, IDEO highlights the potential of integrating AI with Design Thinking to enhance creativity and user-centric innovation.
Hands-on Agile 2025 is Here: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility
We’re thrilled to announce that the virtual Hands-on Agile 2025 is officially on the horizon and will be free to attend from February 4-6, 2025. This time, we will focus on how Agile needs to evolve from concept-based agility to context-based agility.
But before we discuss what that means, let’s take a step back and consider why Hands-on Agile 2025 is going to be a can’t-miss event for everyone in the agile community.
For those unfamiliar, Hands-on Agile isn’t just another conference. It’s an event built around the Barcamp model, meaning it’s a self-organized, community-driven gathering with one goal: Sharing knowledge and experiences.
From February 4 to 6, 2025, we will spend three energizing days engaging in sessions, practicing agile games, sharing war stories, and learning directly from each other. Hands-on Agile is all about creating a space for practitioners, coaches, leaders, and newcomers to connect in a truly hands-on way.
TL; DR: Bringing Problems to Leaders — Food for Agile Thought #461
Welcome to the 461st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,821 peers. This week, Ant Murphy advocates for bringing problems to leaders to foster collaboration and empathy over the ‘don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions’ mindset, while Melissa Perri critiques Paul Graham’s ‘Founder Mode,’ urging founder CEOs to balance vision with scalable strategies. Murray Robinson, Shane Gibson, and William Malek explore Haier’s decentralized operating model, and Shane Hastie and Declan Whelan emphasize the importance of technical health and Agile practices. Chris Matts critiques escalations, highlighting their role in reinforcing dysfunctional leadership, and a deep dive explores the perils of Founder Mode’s micromanagement and lack of transparency.
Next, Peter Yang addresses the growing negativity towards product managers, offering ten actionable insights to regain respect. Also, in conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Camille Fournier discusses platform engineering frustrations and tips for new managers. Rohan Dehal explores how business models shape product strategy, focusing on aligning user needs with business goals, and Andrew Chen critiques common startup pivots, urging founders to prioritize refining their core product and targeting top users for success.
Lastly, John Cutler highlights three models—capability trees, customer journeys, and growth loops—that prevent siloed thinking in product development. At the same time, Maarten Dalmijn urges teams to prioritize value over timelines, Bandan Jot Singh critiques NPS, advocating for real-time sentiment analysis in D2C companies, and Paweł Huryn shares 12 key sources for product discovery. Finally, Jason Cohen explores the accuracy of crowd wisdom in objective scenarios but warns against its stifling effect on innovation in creative work.
This article delves into the darker aspects of Founder Mode, popularized by Paul Graham and others. It offers a critical perspective for agile practitioners, product leaders, startup founders, and managers who embrace this paradigm and probably fall victim to survivorship bias; the Jobs and the Cheskys are the exception, not the rule.
The article explores how resulting tendencies, such as micromanagement, lack of strategic transparency, team devaluation, and reckless risk-taking, can undermine organizational health, stifle innovation, and conflict with agile principles. These can jeopardize long-term success while making work in organizations with a failed founder mode application miserable for everyone below the immediate leadership level and the founder himself.
TL; DR: Copy-Paste Agile — Food for Agile Thought #460
Welcome to the 460th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,798 peers. This week, Maarten Dalmijn argues that the era of one-size-fits-all Agile is over, advocating for agnostic approaches tailored to organizational contexts over mere Copy-Paste Agile, and Gustavo Razzetti challenges rigid psychological safety truisms, urging leaders to promote ownership and courage instead. Willem-Jan Ageling highlights common Scrum practices that frustrate developers, while Joost Minnaar shares insights from over 50 self-managing organizations exemplifying the RenDanHeYi model. Also, Pierre Pureur and Kurt Bittner discuss how embracing technical debt through Minimum Viable Architecture can accelerate learning.
Next, James Gunaca explores the evolving product management job market, emphasizing competition and shifting hiring practices. Aakash Gupta shares retention strategies from his 15-year experience in product, while Stephen Shapiro offers unconventional innovation prompts that foster long-term value and differentiation. Moreover, David Pereira outlines five tactics for B2B product managers to avoid the “feature factory” trap, focusing on balancing customer wants with user needs, iterating quickly, and leveraging qualitative data.
Lastly, Mark Somerfield critiques The Lean Startup, emphasizing the importance of strong relationships over data-driven processes. Johanna Rothman advocates for using Cost of Delay (CoD) to align teams with business goals, while Bandan Jot Singh offers a practical guide to prioritizing features using the Kano model. Productside provides a comprehensive overview of U.S. Product Management salaries in 2024, and David Pinsof presents 30 concepts exploring manipulation, self-deception, and the role of status in human behavior.
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