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Food for Agile Thought #364: Empowered Product Teams? Shifting Product Culture, Experimentation, Don’t Let ‘Done’ Be Misunderstood

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-10-14 News

TL; DR: Empowered Product Teams? — Food for Agile Thought #364

Welcome to the 364th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 36,083 peers. This week, we share the real-life case of an organization embracing Marty Cagan’s ‘empowered product teams (EPT)’ model entirely—with underwhelming results. Moreover, we ask why the concept of “Done” seems to be constantly misunderstood in organizations while we explore why engineering speed drops over time and what you can do about it. Additionally, we delve into an “understanding of management (managing), self-managing, and the manager role.”

Then, we consider that many transformations fail because they lack a focus on product leadership and cover the challenges of managing a product in its mature state, from figuring out whether your product has achieved that stage to the four top-handling strategies. Also, Doc Norton analyzes the path from complexity to our need for certainty to experimentation based on observations, questions, hypotheses, methods, and results, and we illuminate the importance of Sprint Goals for a Scrum team’s success.

Finally, we listen to Allan Kelly proposing a seven-step, lightweight process to develop products, building on his previous work, and appreciate a new exercise from John Cutler to help teams to move from focusing on how they measure to what they measure. Lastly, Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on the annual planning ritual in engineering, from the futility of a bottom-up approach to constraints and dependencies.

Food for Agile Thought #364: Empowered Product Teams? Shifting Product Culture, Experimentation, Don’t Let ‘Done’ Be Misunderstood — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #363: Tracking Learnings, Impact Mapping for Fun & Profit, Games as Change Tools, DORA 2022 Accelerate Report

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-10-07 News

TL; DR: Tracking Learnings, Impact Mapping for Fun & Profit — Food for Agile Thought #363

Welcome to the 363rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 36,042 peers. This week, we delve into tracking learnings and what to do with all the “stuff” that continuous product discovery produces. Also, we analyze the utility of agile games as change-supporting tools and share a decision-making approach to scaling, from “don’t scale” to “managing dependencies between work to be done.” Finally, we consider the fact that “simple” covers a vast ground and has the potential to cause confusion and misinterpretation. (You may want to reconsider your KISS approach.)

Then, we advocate getting comfortable with impact mapping when you have a “vague goal but haven’t yet done a good exploration of how to get there.” Again, we also stress the importance of product discovery, given that we all love “our ideas” when building new businesses, before we point out five practices that will enable your team to take full advantage of the Product Backlog as a tactical tool.

Finally, we appreciate Paulo Caroli’s curated list of popular practices for organizing meetings; he also provides a downloadable PDF and a Mural template. On top of that, Andrea Saez shares the “Customer Value Explorer,” a canvas to map customer value against business objectives. Lastly, Google Cloud published the “2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report,” focusing on security.

Food for Agile Thought #363: Tracking Learnings, Impact Mapping for Fun & Profit, Games as Change Tools, DORA 2022 Accelerate Report — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #362: Agile Military, Product Strategy Failure Patterns, DesignOps 101, SAFe® for Decision Makers

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-09-30 News

TL; DR: Agile Military — Food for Agile Thought #362

Welcome to the 362nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 36,013 peers. This week, we delve into lessons learned on leadership in the agile military. We also read a curated collection of articles, “facts, evidence, and opinions from relevant sources without vested interests” on the usefulness of SAFe® and analyze common reasons why organizations do not reap the expected benefits of becoming Agile. Moreover, we ask: Do we need a CUO, a Chief Unblocking Officer?

Then, we dissect strategy anti-patterns, from committing too early to prospective customers to dodging controversial calls while delving into product leadership, team objectives, and the importance of context and clarity. Also, Jon Moore and Marty Cagan continued their article series, detailing why consequential transformations to product-led organizations require different decision processes, and Kate Kaplan created an overview of the human side of DesignOps: who is doing what and talking to whom?

Finally, we sketch various mental models, concepts, and “laws” helpful to Scrum Masters and agile coaches and delve into the relationship between hypothesis-driven development, validation, and the minimum viable product. Lastly, we learn that just because your Sprint board has columns and cards does not mean it is a Kanban board.

Food for Agile Thought #362: Agile Military, Product Strategy Failure Patterns, DesignOps 101, SAFe® for Decision Makers — Age-of-Product.com

Join the Anonymous Scrum Master (and Agile Coach) Salary Report 2023

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-09-26 Agile and ScrumNews

TL;DR: Scrum Master Salary Report 2023 — An Anonymous Poll by the Community for the Community

The purpose of this anonymous Scrum Master salary report 2023 is to create a clear, data-backed benchmark that allows everyone in the agile community to understand whether their compensation is adequate. (And yes, the report will cover Scrum Masters as well as Agile Coaches, both employed and freelancing.)

The goal is to have a sufficient number of replies – that would be at least 1,000 – by the end of November 2022 to create the report in time for January 2023. Of course, the report will be available for free.

Join the Scrum Master Salary Report 2023 — Age-of-Product.com

👉 📈 Join the Anonymous Poll for the Upcoming Free Scrum Master Salary Report 2023 Now!

Food for Agile Thought #361: Useful Agile Metrics, The Stakeholder Whisperer, Successful Transformations, Surviving the Feature Factory

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-09-23 News

TL; DR: Useful Agile Metrics — Food for Agile Thought #361

Welcome to the 361st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,942 peers. This week, we enjoy an Agile 2022 workshop, where Doc Norton deep-dives into the tricky issue of useful agile metrics, from the problematic ones, like velocity, to gaming metrics to selecting metrics that support your team. Also, we dissect contributing factors to successful agile transformations while pointing at what to avoid, from cargo-cultism to HyperScrum-dementalism to agile scapegoatism, and delve into the rationale of higher purpose goals, from motivating people to driving autonomy. Finally, did you know that the fourth element of Scrum’s empiricism—beyond transparency, inspection, and adaptation—is hiding in plain sight in a sentence on Scrum Values?

Then, we learn from Lenny Rachitsky how to best proceed in becoming the stakeholder whisperer, while Jon Moore and Marty Cagan sketch necessary changes in how you build products when transforming to become a strong, product-led company. Moreover, John Cutler reflects on the “tension between your go-to-market (GTM) and product teams as you scale,” resulting in more complexity, for example, product debt. By the way, there is also an interview with John by Jason Knight.

Finally, we listen to John Drogosz pitching the advantages of value stream mapping for cross-functional teams to improve their way of working and suggest ten steps to gain any basic industry understanding, from diagrams to glossaries to thought leaders and conferences. Moreover, Rita McGrath elaborates on Kodak’s demise and what the halo effect has to do with it. Think printers from the company that invented digital photography.

Food for Agile Thought #361: Useful Agile Metrics, The Stakeholder Whisperer, Successful Transformations, Surviving the Feature Factory — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #360: How Minds Change, Think Big & Work Small, Grassroots Movements, Elements of Agile Assessment

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-09-16 News

TL; DR: How Minds Change, Think Big & Work Small — Food for Agile Thought #360

Welcome to the 360th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,907 peers. This week, we have a fantastic interview with David McRaney on how minds change, rationalization, and belief. (If you are coaching other people, you should listen.) Also, we learn how teams can “experiment and learn, develop new markets, [and] outmaneuver the competition,” and we reflect on who may likely get ahead when encountering an impediment. Switching perspectives, we delve into the “best way to kill a grassroots movement at your company” and how to help it flourish instead.

Then, we point to the necessary “changes to how the product teams need to interact with customers” when an organization abandons a sales-driven approach, and Roman Pichler details his product model, from product vision to Product Backlog, including four artifacts and two templates. Moreover, we reflect on the perils of Think Small and Work Big, Think Big, Work Big, and Think Small, Work Small, and link mental models to building products, from Parkinson’s Law of Triviality to Conway’s Law to the Pareto Principle.

Finally, Mike Cohn shares a free assessment tool for your team’s mastery of 20 essential elements of a successful transformation. Also, we advocate using anti-personas to “help anticipate how products can be misused in ways that can harm users and the business.” Lastly, Phil Mistry tells the incredible story of an invention ahead of its time in a classic case of an innovator’s dilemma: How Steve Sasson invented Kodak’s digital camera!