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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.

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

Food for Agile Thought #344: Product Waste, Little’s Law & Forecasts, Stripe’s Product-Led Growth, Sprint Review Anti-Patterns

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-05-27 News

TL; DR: Product Waste, Little’s Law & Forecasts — Food for Agile Thought #344

Welcome to the 344th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,342 peers. This week, we delve into the patterns of product waste resulting from an ‘organizational and conceptual gap’ between product and engineering teams on the one side and sales and marketing teams on the other side. Also, we outline how to support your teams emotionally in challenging times, and we visualize the mental model of developers as systems thinkers, from inner and outer loops to flow states to context switching. Moreover, we reflect on those who ‘dodge gatekeepers and dance around policies, doing whatever it takes to get the job done.’

Then, we provide insight into Stripe’s product strategy, resulting in a ‘microcosm of product-led, developer-centric growth.’ Moreover, we guide the reader from JTBD to user-centered design to the CCVC framework, and we listen to Chad McAllister interviewing Mike Mace on how to get customer insights quickly to counter demands from your resident HiPPO or a pushy sales team.

Also, we show how the application of Little’s Law can support your team’s forecast quality, and, finally, we address the widespread belief that Kanban is nothing more than some columns on a board and a handful of cards to push around, resulting in highly complex boards of little value.

Food for Agile Thought #344: Product Waste, Little’s Law and Forecasts, Stripe’s Product-Led Growth, Sprint Review Anti-Patterns — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #343: Why Teams Estimate, Sales Team Prevents Customer Contact, How to Provide Critical Feedback, The HiPPO Effect

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-05-20 News

TL; DR: Why Teams Estimate, the HiPPO Effect — Food for Agile Thought #343

Welcome to the 343rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,304 peers. This week, we point to good reasons why teams estimate: ‘credibility, deeper thinking, prioritization, and insight.’ Also, we explore six ways of avoiding the 💩 sandwich when providing critical feedback, and we watch a classic: Henrik Kniberg visualizes the cost and consequences of moving from single-piece flow to simultaneously working on multiple work items.

Then, we suggest dealing with resistance from stakeholders, such as the sales folks, who fear meeting their quotas, and we highlight some of the ‘dysfunctions around decision making and offer ways to overcome them.’ Moreover, we delve into the strange effects of the highest-paid person’s opinion, from manifestations to impact to suggestions on how to deal with them. (High impact release notes may be one helpful tactic; learn how to author them.)

Also, we enjoy Sachin Rekhi’s take on Jeff Bezos’ June 2004 instruction: ‘From now on, your presentation software is Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint. Get used to it.’ Finally, ‘Programmers are also human’ celebrates McBoston’s Josh Doe, formerly Agile Consulting, Inc.

Food for Agile Thought #343: Why Teams Estimate, Sales Team Prevents Customer Contact, How to Provide Critical Feedback, The HiPPO Effect — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #342: Agile Laggards, Fireside Chat with Marty Cagan, Stakeholder Trust, How to (Really) Measure NPS

by Stefan Wolpers | 2022-05-13 News

TL; DR: Agile Laggards, Fireside Chat with Marty Cagan — Food for Agile Thought #342

Welcome to the 342nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,264 peers. This week, we point to Geoffrey Moore’s ‘Technology Adoption Life Cycle,’ and that ‘Agile’ has entered the laggards segment. We also delve into an essential team success factor — stakeholder trust — and reflect on ‘balancing long-lived teams with short term coordination and alignment.’

Then, we learn how to determine best whether an idea is worth pursuing and define six ‘first principles’ for product leaders to deal with team topology, from ownership to alignment to autonomy. Moreover, we follow Behzod Sirjani, who believes that NPS has been turned into a useless vanity metric while it has actual value for measuring ‘word-of-mouth loops.’

Also, we advocate not focusing on productivity but, for example, on value, quality, speed, and flexibility, as they may lead to higher productivity later on. Lastly, we enjoy a fireside chat with Marty Cagan, where he addresses empowerment, adopting a product-led mindset, and why project-oriented companies should consider becoming product-oriented.