In this highly engaging talk at the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Jimmy Janlén addresses the core element of “Agile,” it’s key to speed, innovation, and success: team autonomy. Learn more about its benefits, challenges, fears, and pains and what organizations can do to unleash it.
Welcome to the 331st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 34,627 peers. This week, we listen to Stephen J. Dubner interviewing the economist John List on the trickiness of scaling ideas from successful experiments to actual products and services, quitting, and his book “The Voltage effect.” We also revisit the idea that transformations towards “becoming agile” primarily fail amid a disregard for the first value of the Agile Manifesto. Moreover, we applaud Dave Kerr for aggregating a comprehensive list of helpful mental models for engineering and product development, from Brooks’s Law to YAGNI to Hanlon’s Razor.
We then suggest the “bait the hook, feed the fish” approach for stakeholder communication by adopting the mindset of a newsletter creator. Next, we provide an epic list of essays, videos, and books on the most critical journey of every new product: product/market fit. Also, we delve into the many hats a product manager is wearing, from road mapping to running experiments to being the user advocate, and we follow Kim Witten, who declares the Net Promoter Score ® “unscientific and meaningless” and suggests alternatives.
Lastly, we suggest abandoning the classic code review being a time-sink and switching to mob programming instead, and we list fifteen common behaviors of teams that successfully utilize data in their daily work, from healthy skepticism to killing features and experiments to grappling with uncertainty.
One of my favorite exercises from my Professional Scrum Product Owner classes is how to best sabotage a Product Owner as a member of the middle management. The exercise rules are simple: You’re not allowed to use any form of illegal activity. So, outsourcing the task to a bunch of outlaws is out of the question. Instead, you are only allowed to use practices that are culturally acceptable within your organization.
Read on and learn more on how to best sabotage a Product Owner from the exercise results of more than twenty PSPO classes. (I edited the suggestions for better readability.)
Welcome to the 330th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 34,562 peers. This week, we point out the importance of saying no to make room for tackling high-value adhoc/new activities. Also, we delve into how to change the way you respond to challenges by embracing a whole ‘body yes.’ We then explore the origins of low-quality code and what you can do to avoid accruing technical debt as a consequence, and we shed light on the problem of unwarranted confidence because a heuristic has served you well forever. (Until it doesn’t.)
We then share an epic guide on what web3 is, its pros and cons, and how web3 may become an opportunity for your product career. Also, we have eleven tips on improving communication with your engineers, from including them early to respecting their BS detector, and we learn how to switch into survival mode as a product mensch when your company is about to go belly-up.
Lastly, we revisit “real OKRs,” try to regain control over your calendar, freeing up time for critical issues, and ask: Is a Scrum certificate a sound investment for your career?
Do you need a Scrum certification to become good at what you do? Not really. It took me nine years after I started working in this industry to get my first certificate.
What are the benefits then of having a Scrum certification? Well, becoming certified by a recognized Scrum certification organization such as Scrum.org is sound investment advice, as documented by the Scrum Master Salary Report 2022: There is a statistical correlation between your remuneration and the certificates you hold.
Also, prospective clients and employers use, for example, PSM and CSM as search terms on LinkedIn. Scrum certificates are hence an affordable way of signaling competence and dedication. However, be smart about where to become certified and avoid investing in Scrum certificates that have no brand recognition.
Welcome to the 329th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 34,503 peers. This week, we address #NoCoaching, pointing at situations and probable consequences when your work as a coach is rejected. We also elaborate on the benefits of having a capable Scrum Master at your side and what you can do as a product mensch if there is none, and we point out critical knowledge to become agile: maximizing the amount of work not done is essential.
We then provide a pragmatic, hands-on approach to deciding which ideas are worth further attention, and we delve into the effects of rushing to work before clarifying your team’s vision and mission. Moreover, we share Tendayi Viki’s take on how to move from being a corporate pirate—restrained by red tape—to a valued explorer, appreciated by the organization.
Lastly, we point at numbers for healthy (vs. deathly) churn for B2C and B2B companies serving various markets. Also, we explain why the habit of under-promising and over-delivering regarding OKRs is an anti-pattern, not a qualification, and we share an epic guide on how to ace remote work and why improving your writing skills is essential.
