Category: News

TL; DR: Your Creative Second Brain — Food for Agile Thought #391

Welcome to the 391st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 46,445 peers. This week, Tiago Forte shares the essence of his massively popular book on productivity, supporting your second brain. Also, we address proven techniques that will ‘help you to effectively communicate your vision and get buy-in from your team for your change,’ and we examine three approaches that exceptional teams use to accept failure at individual, group, and organization-wide levels, allowing them to learn, develop, and enhance their performance.

Then, we point to a video game practice that is highly effective for products, too: Games help users become more skilled throughout their journey, as onboarding is a continuous process. John Cutler answers, ‘What are you working on right now, and why is it the most important thing you could be working on?’ in all the wrong ways, and we explain different approaches to learning whether a customer might buy from the worst way to one that actually works. Moreover, Stripe’s CTO David Singleton describes how to build a product-minded engineering team that excels at planning and prioritizing at scale.

Finally, Charles Lambdin applies some ideas from the past to create products today, from Lenin’s concepts of commandism and tailism to Marx’s notions of struggle and contradiction. (Think of it as a kind of intellectual stretching.) We also talk about vanity metrics and share that it is primarily our lack of courage that leads us to seek refuge in estimates instead of facing the undeniable truth that software development inherently involves risks.

The most popular discussion on LinkedIn last week was: 🤬 Rant: Scrum Masters are no Project Managers!

TL; DR: AI Replacing Developers — Food for Agile Thought #390

Welcome to the 390th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 46,277 peers. This week, we ask a simple question: Is AI replacing Developers a likely future? In the meantime, we delve into the importance of (software) architecture in an agile context, suggest alleviating some of the additional cognitive load developers shouldering with DevOps, and deep-dive into lessons learned on overcoming long-standing behaviors and winning hearts and minds.

Then, we suggest that as a product leader, you must ensure that you negotiate the right aspects by going beyond debating solutions and delving deeper to reach a consensus. Moreover, Itamar Gilad cautions against using generative AI to produce product management artifacts, pointing to serious tradeoffs, and Mike Cohn dissects a familiar template, looking at the “elements, advantages, and drawbacks of the three-part story template.”

Finally, we advocate using OKRs with Story Maps to support your release strategy, list positive attributes your goals should reflect, and cherish the ProductOps Manifesto. Lastly, we applaud Matt Schlicht for creating an epic intro to the latest AI trend; we might all become managers, herding bots.

TL; DR: The Perils of Deterministic Thinking — Food for Agile Thought #388

Welcome to the 388th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 46,012 peers. This week, we delve into the perils of deterministic thinking and reflect on what growth may mean for a Scrum team, covering the spectrum from product discovery to DevOps. Also, we suggest strategies to minimize the influence of engineering work’s two most costly factors and point to wrong ideas typically plaguing agile transformation, from installing practices to changing culture to the mystical one-time change effort.

Then, we share real-life examples, including prompts on how product managers already use ChatGPT daily and follow John Cutler, who looks beyond the usual product-market fit approach, claiming that the biggest challenge is Product-Reality Fit instead. Also, we map the problem of creating product goals onto the Cynefin Framework and detail what experimentation entails in the complex or chaotic domain. Speaking of creating goals: you want to mitigate the risk of running in the wrong direction. Ant Murphy suggests an excellent tool for that: the pre-mortem risk analysis.

Finally, Sevawise Games created a free Monte Carlo Estimation tool that supports Parabol’s fine primer on estimation, from Planning Poker to Wall Estimation to #NoEstimates. Moreover, we explore whether we can use ChatGPT-4 to create workshops for agile practitioners; for example, Scrum Masters. Lastly, Dave Gray details the development steps of the well-known Innovation Ecosystem Map.

TL; DR: Culture & Methods Trends 2023 — Food for Agile Thought #387

Welcome to the 387th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 45,893 peers. This week, Shane Hastie introduces the Culture & Methods Trends 2023 report, from culture handbooks to LLM-supported development to scaling frameworks entering the Late Majority. Moreover, we learn from an interview with Brendan Marsh about Spotify and its way of working, the obvious question being: Is there a ‘Spotify Model?’ Also, we list three critical issues leading to less effective Retrospectives, from inconsistency to a lack of contributions to failure to follow up on action items, and point out that SAFe may not be ideal, but applying it may lead to a higher level of business agility, depending on the environment and context.

Then, Maret Kruve remembers her challenges when starting as a product manager, being an introvert, and how she coped with them. Also, we learn suggestions for encouraging engineers to involve themselves more effectively in the ideation process. In a shocking revelation, Michalina Bidzinska explains why “listening to users is less important than observing their actions,” as they all lie to us.

Finally, we reflect on issues and challenges when using NPS beyond its intended purpose as a consumer research tool and ask ChatGPT to help us with OKR design. Speaking of metrics, Tendayi Viki dissects the idea of return on investment for innovation, distinguishing two realms: the “innovation team lives in Explore, whereas the executive board lives in Exploit.” Lastly, we explore how Chinese companies “prioritize autonomy at scale, internal digital platforms, and a clear project focus.”

TL; DR: Scrum Police, Marty Cagan on Transformations — Food for Agile Thought #386

Welcome to the 386th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 45,734 peers. This week, we applaud Mike Cohn and his fantastic squad from the Scrum Police for battling the countless misadventures of wonky Scrum implementations. Also, Jurriaan Kamer explores six options to “revitalize your agile transformation” while we reflect on the “relationship between organization and self-organization,” as systems self-organize within constraints. Moreover, Shane Snow claims, “despite our natural propensity to trust, a lack of trust is the #1 underlying cause of dysfunction in teams,” and Jason Cohen dives into humanity’s repeated pattern of inability to predict the future and what techniques we have to navigate our volatile world.

Then, Marty Cagan shares his thoughts on common transformation pitfalls, from outsourcing the transformation to McBoston to the widespread desire for a process, and Tim Herbig suggests addressing the analysis-paralysis problem product teams face during product discovery. Additionally, Dave Gray shares several free innovation-related illustrations, from the corporate innovation ecosystem to measuring innovation to plugging into the startup ecosystem.

Finally, we appreciate that Corinna Baldauf turned all 144 Retromat exercises into a giant Miro template and enjoy Nick Brown’s excellent primer on the many problems, issues, and flaws of a favorite concept of many organizations: flow efficiency. Russ Roberts interviews Kevin Kelly about his book ‘Excellent Advice for Living,’ and why Kevin Kelly is not worried about AI, and we close with David Rotman’s belief that LLMs would inevitably cause a revolution by transforming many jobs. Whether that will be beneficial to society is up to us to decide.