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Food for Agile Thought #315: Fulfilling Working Experiences, Sustainable Disruption, Toxic Company Culture, Jira: Razor Blades?

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-10-24 News

TL; DR: Fulfilling Working Experiences, Sustainable Disruption — Food for Agile Thought #315

Welcome to the 315th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,364 peers. This week, we will learn how kindness, consideration, and respect can transform any team into a fulfilling working experience. We also look at using our current knowledge to nudge the post-pandemic world into a better place. Finally, for the sake of contrast, we also list six attributes of a dysfunctional corporate culture, from information hoarding to recreational complaining to high top performer turnover.

We then refer to Star Trek’s transporter tech to visualize software creation in an agile context. (Okay, it is about many backlog items turning into a releasable Increment.) Moreover, we delve into successful decision-making, pointing at drivers, constraints, and floats, and we propose a pivot for startups from technical diligence to product diligence before funding rounds and deliver a framework for the task.

Lastly, we analyze the evaporating illusion of long-term planning when you start using OKRs to target outcomes, and we summarize the whole story point thingy. (Maybe, some people will learn this time.)

Food for Agile Thought #315: Fulfilling Working Experiences, Sustainable Disruption, Toxic Company Culture, Jira: Razor Blades? Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #314: Tech Revolutions, Benefits of Negative Feedback, Better Scrum w/ Cards & Games, The Art of Interviewing

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-10-17 News

TL; DR: Tech Revolutions, Benefits of Negative Feedback — Food for Agile Thought #314

Welcome to the 314th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,281 peers. This week, we offer a summary of Carlota Perez’s 2002 book ‘Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital;’ a must-read to understand innovation and disruption. We also share free cards and games to help Scrum teams get better at using Scrum to its full potential, and we explain the critical importance of pre-mortems for unearthing unknown unknowns regularly.

We then refer to Elon Musk and the importance of welcoming negative feedback, whether some egos are bruised in the process or not, and listen to an interview with Ash Maurya — Mr. Lean Canvas — on enabling continuous improvement innovation. Moreover, we introduce the subtleties of learning when practicing user interviews, from the basics to common mistakes, providing a guide to improve your interviewing skills.

Lastly, we share a list of free innovation tools, from the ‘Innovation Maturity Assessment’ to the ‘Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation,’ and we delve into the most common mistakes made when gathering data from agile teams by employing surveys and how to avoid them.

Food for Agile Thought #314: Tech Revolutions, Benefits of Negative Feedback, Better Scrum w/ Cards & Games, The Art of Interviewing — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #313: The Problem-Solving Trap, Suitably Detailed Roadmap Items, Beloved Definition of Done, Miro’s Product Alignment Framework

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-10-10 News

TL; DR: The Problem-Solving Trap, Beloved DoD — Food for Agile Thought #313

Welcome to the 313th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,207 peers. This week, we offer valuable advice on staying cognitively open, thus avoiding the problem of killing new ideas too early while being open to feedback at the same time. We also point at five good reasons to embrace the DoD, from having a quality standard to simplifying communication to providing clarity, and we delve into a well-known fallacy of decision making and how we confuse probability with propensity.

We then share a compact introduction to user stories, covering the “card, conversation, confirmation” approach to templates to the importance of keeping the Pareto principle in mind when creating new things. Moreover, we walk you through the appropriate levels of detailing product roadmap items, from “thing happening now” to “far-off things” to avoid creating noise, and we talk about bugs, refactoring, and their implication on product strategy and the flow within your product team.

Lastly, we talk about metrics and goals on the path to becoming an agile organization, and we introduce the tool Miro used to weather the pandemic-driven massive influx of new users by structuring product discovery and retrospectives in the process.

Food for Agile Thought #313: The Problem-Solving Trap, Suitably Detailed Roadmap Items, Beloved Definition of Done, Miro’s Product Alignment Framework — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #312: The Micromanager, Ralph Stacey (1942-2021), Jeff’s HiPPOism, Cost per Story Point?

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-10-03 News

TL; DR: The Micromanager, Jeff’s HiPPOism — Food for Agile Thought #312

Welcome to the 312th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,158 peers. This week, we deep dive into the main culprit of many failed agile transformations: The micromanager. We also learn about the most underappreciated Scrum event, and we remember the late Ralph Stacey.

We then talk HiPPOism, referring to the “Jeff-wants-it”-Fire Phone of Amazon; we look at two frameworks to improve product interaction and the overall user experience, and we address a tricky and risky topic: Transferring a legacy product onto a new tech stack.

Lastly, we ask: Can we use story points for cost calculation? Also, we note that research efforts need to be represented in Product Backlogs to encourage continuous learning.

Food for Agile Thought #312: The Micromanager, Ralph Stacey (1942-2021), Jeff’s HiPPOism, Cost per Story Point? — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #311: No More Deadlines, Shipping the Org Chart, Goodbye Managers, OKRs Are Networks

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-09-26 News

TL; DR: No More Deadlines, Goodbye Managers — Food for Agile Thought #311

Welcome to the 311th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,103 peers. This week, we reflect on the abandonment of deadlines for team health and the effectiveness of engineering projects. Also, we delve into the obsolescence of the modern manager; we define cross-functional vs. t-shaped to avoid confusion within teams and larger agile ecosystems, and we have a look at how large companies manage engineering projects.

We then explore how teams can make better product decisions, for example, by employing the Jobs-to-be-done framework; we share war stories from Microsoft regarding the perils of reflecting internal communication structures in a product’s design, and we list eight concerns about NPS, from displacing other efforts to a bad word of mouth.

Lastly, we share the results of a large study on remote work based on data from 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020, and we point at a critical issue in applying OKRs: They don’t work as intended when merely handed down from top to bottom.

Food for Agile Thought #311: No More Deadlines, Shipping the Org Chart, Goodbye Managers, OKRs Are Networks — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #310: Necessity of Leadership Engagement, OKRs in PM—A Practical Guide, Walking the Board, 15 Behaviors of Effective Teams

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-09-19 News

TL; DR: The Necessity of Leadership Engagement, OKRs in PM — Food for Agile Thought #310

Welcome to the 310th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,061 peers. This week, we delve into the necessity of leadership engagement to make change happen. We also show a way out of the ‘answering three questions’ mode for your Daily Scrum, and we ask: Can you take self-management to new heights even within a small organization of 7-8 people?

We then characterize traits of high-performing product teams, from healthy skepticism to experimentation to dealing with uncertainty. Moreover, we delve into improving the relationship between the product folks and business stakeholders within your organization in a mutually beneficial way, and we point at three first principles of valuable roadmaps, an excellent primer for stakeholders outside a product team.

Lastly, we share a free Excel-based tool for organizations that aspire to excel at software delivery practices to improve value creation, as well as a valuable guide to help you apply OKRs when you’re working in product management.