TL; DR: Talking to Customers, Learning Repository — Food for Agile Thought #332
Welcome to the 332nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 34,681 peers. This week, we regret that most product managers seem to have stopped talking to customers nowadays. Also, we list nine reasons to become agile, from a bad ‘it’s the trendy thing to do’ to a good ‘we believe in the Agile values and principles.’ Moreover, we deal with fixing unnecessary dependencies, and we suggest utilizing seven classic team building models to ‘inspire, troubleshoot, and build alignment,’ from Tuckman to Katzenbach to Hackman.
We then argue that it is essential to create a learning repository to run experience-informed experiments, and we share an epic list of binge-worthy material on product ownership. In addition to that, Teresa Torres provides her approach to identifying candidates for both “beginner” and experienced product teams for user interviews.
Lastly, we share a simple visualization tool to foster rapid idea generation—quantity may have its own quality, and we follow Jeff Gothelf, who vigorously opposes the notion that goals do not need continuous review and adjustment. And there is one more thing: The Guardian reports on a damning new Netflix documentary, detailing the consequences when a once engineering- and quality-driven culture is forced by the new management to bow to Wall Street.