TL; DR: Continuous Improvement, Innovation Heroes? — Food for Agile Thought #307
Welcome to the 307th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 32,883 peers. This week, we explore the heart of continuous improvement; we dissect the leadership anti-pattern of rewarding the continuation of a broken system, and we suggest eight attitudes to describe leadership styles in a VUCA world, ranging from the organizational refactorer to the flow manager.
We then delve into the anti-pattern of product requirements documents (PRD), substituting proper product discovery. Moreover, we show that successful businesses figure out how to align their goals with the customers they serve. Also, we provide insight into how to practice empathy and communicate effectively with the leadership.
Lastly, we enjoy a podcast with Mr. User Story Mapping Jeff Patton, explaining how you can transform ordinary teams into extraordinary ones by fixing the product backlog.
TL; DR: Selling Product’s Success, Method and Framework Prison — Food for Agile Thought #306
Welcome to the 306th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 32,841 peers. This week, we delve into selling Product’s success. Also, we apply David Marguest’s ‘thinking time’ and ‘doing time’ concepts to Scrum events, and we learn what we can do to escape the craziness of methods and frameworks.
We then describe how Intercom changed its NPS strategy to provide helpful customer insights across the company; we share Dovetail’s success story of turning a massive set of qualitative data into an actionable roadmap, and we discuss ethical principles to guide your user research.
Lastly, we share a list of tips and tricks to get more out of your working day without putting in more hours, and we point to the importance of understanding the information cascade and its effect on popular estimation techniques.
TL; DR: Coaching Executive Mindsets, Big Project Syndrome — Food for Agile Thought #305
Welcome to the 305th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 32,803 peers. This week, we delve into coaching executive mindsets; we are getting into the zone with the Agile Fluency Model, and we reflect on the difference between accountability and responsibility and how to avoid confusing them.
We then come back to a familiar and highly destructive leadership pattern: turning big ideas into similar-sized projects. Moreover, we point at common analytics problems and how product teams can measure success more effectively, and we mention that output metrics are an obsolete and counterproductive way of measuring human impact in a world of knowledge.
Lastly, we delve into practical aspects of reinventing organizations, from resilience to socio-technical systems to the power of visualization.
TL; DR: Logical Fallacies, Agile 2.0 — Food for Agile Thought #304
Welcome to the 304th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 32,756 peers. This week, we share an epic list of logical fallacies created by faulty reasoning that influence decision-making. We also listen to an idea of what the next iteration of ‘Agile’ might be — 20 years after the manifesto, and we reject the idea that simply sticking to the INVEST principles will automatically create good user stories.
We then share a list of visualization models to help deal with complexity in product management. Moreover, we learn why going with evidence, not opinions might turn out to be highly lucrative, and we reflect on the benefits of taking our time to get products right.
Lastly, we point at the disservice we accept when we apply false analogies to creating software, and we embrace a template for a Futurospective.
Join Richard Kasperowski and your peers at the 34th Hands-on Agile Meetup on September 7, 2021: “High-Performance Teams: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety and Emotional Intelligence.”
TL; DR: Failed Agile Rebellion, Prioritizing Hypotheses — Food for Agile Thought #303
Welcome to the 303rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 32,688 peers. This week, we delve into the failed agile rebellion. Moreover, we aggregate a list of 26 patterns for creating new software successfully, and we point at the root cause of transformation-related cultural problems. Also, we share new ideas on how to ‘bring about cultural shifts and mindset changes’ so you can abandon the idea to simply replicate the approach from a case study in your organization.
We then dive into determining which hypotheses you should test, build, or discard; we detail how to replicate a legacy system’s functionality on a new technology stack, and we point to a playbook that focuses on the essential elements for running a Product Discovery, a good primer for teams starting in this field.
Lastly, we get into estimation, estimates, crazy deadlines, and how not to lose your head when a lot is at stake.
