TL; DR: FAST Agile, OKRs’ Dark Side—Food for Agile Thought #289
Welcome to the 289th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 31,016 peers. This week, we delve into FAST Agile to fill the gap for a purely complex agile method. We examine the Boeing 737 Max crashes through the lens of industry and corporate culture, and we point at OKRs’ dark side—their dual-use nature and the inherent prospective misuse potential in the hands of traditional performance management protagonists.
We then share the open-source template of the ‘Product Management Competency Framework;’ we explore the topic of design justice, and we enjoy a teacher’s story of breaking into product management without a CS degree.
Lastly, we point at the pre-requisits of shifting from a traditional management style to genuinely remote leadership, from remote-first to avoiding the rookie mistake of applying controlling tools.
There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. A Sprint Review without stakeholders may create an unhealthy bubble for the Scrum Team due to the disconnect, thus resulting in lower effectiveness.
Join me and explore the reasons and the consequences of stakeholders avoiding participating in the Sprint Review in less than 150 seconds.
TL; DR: Product-Led Is Also Bad, From CTO to CPO—Food for Agile Thought #288
Welcome to the 288th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,952 peers. This week, we counter the popular complaint from product folks that their organization’s sales-drivenness impedes the creation of better products. We also explore the secret ingredients of building high-performance teams, and we suggest a few improvements for a critical step in creating useful software.
We then answer four questions regarding modern product management, from skills to metrics to how engineering can be supportive. Moreover, we share a guide on how to figure out the level of customer satisfaction that allows for sustained growth, and we select product metrics that matter—beyond the usual suspects like NPS.
Lastly, we follow Bill Wake’s reflections on “half-waterfall,” a blend of practices based on upfront planning and agile.
TL; DR: Product Owner Interview Questions — The Product Backlog and Refinement
If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my fourteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master and interviewing dozens of Product Owner candidates on behalf of my clients.
So far, this Product Owner interview guide has been downloaded more than 8,000 times.
There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. The hardening Sprint is one of those Scrum failures that are particularly challenging.
Explore with me the deep-rooted issues we can learn from a team that practices a hardening Sprint, from the level of team maturity to possible organizational concerns of becoming agile in less than 100 seconds.
There are plenty of Scrum Masters failures. Given that Scrum is a framework with a precise and concise yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.
Explore with me three widespread examples of how Scrum Masters fail their team in three short video clips, totaling 5 minutes and 31 seconds.
