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Food for Agile Thought #350: Product Discovery Tool, Team Longevity, Vanity Metrics, Shared Understanding in Sketches

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-07-08 News

TL; DR: Product Discovery Tool, Vanity Metrics — Food for Agile Thought #350

Welcome to the 350th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,507 peers. This week, we introduce the ‘Confidence Meter,’ a product discovery tool. Plus, we ask a seemingly simple question: how do we define team longevity, and is it indeed a helpful approach? Moreover, we enjoy an introductory guide to understanding and using Product Goals to your team’s advantage and point at waste at all levels in our software shops.

Then, we share ‘empirical evidence for the [usefulness of the] Double-Diamond model’ and applaud Jason Yip, who sketched use cases of user stories, from 😞 to 🤔 to 😀 practices. And in case you plan your next career step: Roman Pichler sheds light on the responsibilities of a head of product. Moreover, Janna Bastow talks about being lean while creating and maintaining your roadmap and how objectives and key results (OKR) may help meet that challenge.

Finally, we share John Cutler’s ultimate guide to fighting vanity metrics, from understanding their appeal to identifying and overcoming them. And while we are at it: Agile Uprising provides a guide to helpful metrics in various environments, from flow efficiency to work item age to time to market.

Food for Agile Thought #350: Product Discovery Tool, Team Longevity, Vanity Metrics, Shared Understanding in Sketches — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #349: 4 Deadly Sins of Work Culture, Right-Sizing Your Stories, Engineering Culture at Uber, Little Scrum Islands

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-07-01 News

TL; DR: Engineering Culture, Little Scrum Islands — Food for Agile Thought #349

Welcome to the 349th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,462 peers. This week, we share the impact of a 2014 change in engineering culture at Uber by ‘creating cross-functional program teams and introducing platform teams.’ Moreover, we reflect on why your little, happy Scrum island isn’t enough to achieve business agility, and we combine two powerful coaching tools for agile practitioners to learn from each other. Also, Adam Grant interviews Jenny Chatman on the effects of toxicity, mediocracy, bureaucracy, and anarchy.

Then, we detail how to address the leadership’s need for more predictability by ‘right-sizing’ work items to one- or two-day stories; we delve into the details of product-centric companies, and we listen to Lenny Rachitsky interviewing Teresa Torres on ‘automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making a case for user research, [and] common interviewing mistakes.’

Finally, we refer to the many advantages of using our own products internally, pointing to examples from Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Also, we explain how the ‘5 Whys’ practice works and its benefits, and we enjoy a hearty laugh when Yuri Malishenko applies the IKEA metaphor to Scrum.

Food for Agile Thought #349: 4 Deadly Sins of Work Culture, Right-Sizing Your Stories, Engineering Culture at Uber, Little Scrum Islands — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #348: Ditching Spotify for Scrum, New Product Strategy Framework, Coaching Ain’t a Panacea, Predictability & Options

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-24 News

TL; DR: Ditching Spotify for Scrum — Food for Agile Thought #348

Welcome to the 348th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,438 peers. This week, we share lessons learned from ditching Spotify (the “model”) for autonomous Scrum teams while pointing to an inherent problem when a technique like coaching is treated like a panacea: There are notable side effects. Also, we notice patterns accompanying change and point at leverage points to intervene in a system, and we delve into the benefits of remote work.

Then, Ely Lerner believes that ‘product leaders need a framework to ensure they’re spending the right amount of time and effort on the right priorities.’ Learn more about his framework. Also, we suggest Karin Dames’ ‘recipe for an integrated development process.’ Moreover, we outline an approach to how product teams can create a product a customer will consider unique, and we recommend augmenting merely ‘predictable’ roadmaps for the senior leadership.

Finally, Tim Harford compares today’s change aversion in many corporations with a disaster from 1346, and Mark Graban and Rich Sheridan discuss various lessons learned on improving the conditions for creating outstanding products in a complex environment.

Food for Agile Thought #348: Ditching Spotify for Scrum, New Product Strategy Framework, Coaching Ain’t a Panacea, Predictability & Options — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #347: Beneficial Pre-Mortems, Agility Follows Structure, Scaled Feature Factories, Understanding Refactoring

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-17 News

TL; DR: Beneficial Pre-Mortems, Scaled Feature Factories — Food for Agile Thought #347

Welcome to the 347th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,417 peers. This week, we delve into five success-critical topics for every product manager, from the benefits of pre-mortems to prioritizing your time to ROI and opportunity-cost thinking. Also, we explain code cruft in a metaphor for non-technical people to help the looming conflict between developers and management, and we share learnings from supporting agile transformations at three companies in the insurance and automation industries.

Then, we detail a pattern of non-tech companies heavily investing in digitalization: Despite good intentions, they end up as big feature factories. Moreover, we point out a) how iterating behavioral changes and applying experiments help build the right products and b) the often overlooked signal-to-noise ratio critical for innovation, or: asking for ideas is a bad idea.

Finally, we embrace a simple process that allows everyone on a team to start writing user stories: the Product Backlog Building Canvas. Also, the folks at ProductLed asked 600-plus SaaS businesses about their paths to product-led growth and core metrics such as free to paid accounts conversion rates.

Food for Agile Thought #347: Beneficial Pre-Mortems, Agility Follows Structure, Scaled Feature Factories, Understanding Refactoring — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #346: Pro Frameworks, Ensuring (Product) Excellence, Islands of Agility, 6 Common KPI Mistakes

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-10 News

TL; DR: Pro Frameworks, Ensuring Excellence — Food for Agile Thought #346

Welcome to the 346th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,394 peers. This week, we point to the benefits of frameworks, helping us learn, collaborate, and reduce cognitive load. Also, we explore the idea of starting an agile transformation by splitting off a part of an organization and helping that part become agile first; consequently, we take the stoic perspective on transformations.

Then, we follow Marty Cagan, who adds excellence in the form of a strong product leader to the success recipe of the individual empowered product teams tasked with solving customer problems. Moreover, we address the ‘create customer value’ obsession: Ian Miell claims that ‘many peoples’ work generates value by focussing on things that appear to have no measurable or apparently justifiable customer benefit.’ And we remind ourselves of Goodhart’s Law. (In other words: Why you do not want to become data-driven as a product mensch.)

Finally, we list typical mistakes when measuring success, from vanity metrics to worshipping data. We describe five models to better understand a team’s performance, from Google’s Team Effectiveness Model to the T7 Model of Team Effectiveness, and we share an extensive guide on how to embrace the new hybrid work reality as a facilitator. Lastly, we thank Shane Hastie and Sandy Mamoli for authoring the 2022 edition of the InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends Report.

Food for Agile Thought #346: Pro Frameworks, Ensuring (Product) Excellence, Islands of Agility, 6 Common KPI Mistakes — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #345: Dissonance Causes, Transformation Defined, The Age of Scrum Is Over, Efficiency is the Enemy

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-06-03 News

TL; DR: Dissonance Causes, The Age of Scrum Is Over — Food for Agile Thought #345

Welcome to the 345th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,369 peers. This week, we analyze dissonance causes — resulting in tension, loss, fear, or curiosity — from information to expectations to constraints. Chris Lennon believes that ‘Scrum has given us a lot, but it’s time for some conscious uncoupling.’ And we also share an approach to dealing with the management’s unreal desire to have reliability, predictability, and numbers in software development.

Then, we dissect the idea of ‘managing’ stakeholders instead of aligning all parties in the product game by including everyone and giving everyone a voice, and we have a look at how to create better user stories. Also, we reflect on ‘mastering the delicate relationship between the builders and sellers,’ and we define what a transformation to a product-led organization is about, from ‘changing how you build and deploy’ to ‘changing how you decide which problems to solve.’

Moreover, we analyze the challenges of pursuing an agile-traditional hybrid approach as an organization at the same time to achieve business agility. We also point to an HBR study, claiming that ‘employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%.’ Finally, we share the analysis of an Estonian company’s approach to becoming agile at scale.