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Food for Agile Thought #285: Taleb’s ‘Antifragile,’ Agile Meets Beyond Budgeting, Product Management Design Partnership, Managing Ideas at Scale

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-03-26 News

TL; DR: Agile Meets Beyond Budgeting, Managing Ideas at Scale—Food for Agile Thought #285

Welcome to the 285th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,736 peers. This week, we delve into Nassim Taleb’s ‘Antifragile.’ Also, we detail why Agile meets Beyond Budgeting may represent two roads to the same end: creating greater business agility. Additionally, we point at the importance of questioning our knowledge and opinions in the face of new evidence.

We then enjoy the Head of Design at Stripe’s deep dive into the ideal collaboration between design and product management. Moreover, we share the fundamental principles to enable ideation and innovation at scale, from accessibility to simplicity to discoverability and innovators’ community, and we suggest four ways to track product discovery efforts.

Lastly, we learn how a team can use internal data to create usable forecasts, thus inspiring trust among stakeholders by improving predictions’ quality.

Food for Agile Thought #285: Taleb's ‘Antifragile,’ Agile Meets Beyond Budgeting, Product Management Design Partnership, Managing Ideas at Scale — Age-of-Product.com

🏆 The Agile Camp Berlin Best Session Award

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-03-20 Agile and ScrumNews

The Virtual Agile Camp Berlin Best Session Award

Host the best session on the virtual Agile Camp Berlin 2021 and win a seat in a Professional Scrum Class and other prizes w/ the ACB21 Best Session Award.

🏆 Introducing the ACB21 Best Session Award — Agile Camp Berlin, May 27-29, 2021

Food for Agile Thought #284: Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Estimating Complexity, Dangers of Groupthink, Healthy Goals

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-03-19 News

TL; DR: Estimating Complexity, Healthy Goals—Food for Agile Thought #284

Welcome to the 284th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,648 peers. This week, we learn how to excel in the dark art of ‘estimating’ in general and estimating complexity in particular. We enjoy a conversation on imposter syndrome, deciding under uncertainty, psychological safety, and the Dunning-Kruger effect, and we point at the disadvantages of group work, how to spot if those are taking hold of your group, and how to counter resulting anti-patterns.

We then suggest steps to improve stakeholder engagement with Sprint Reviews and overcome typical anti-patterns, and we dive into AirBnB’s product culture, ranging from storytelling and the Disney influence to experimentation guardrails to what makes a product manager thrive there. Moreover, we explore a product design process leading from ‘I have no clue what to do’ to ‘we should do this,’ using the Circles method to make final recommendations.

Lastly, we embrace the idea that no amount of RACI, SMART, INVEST, OKRs, OGSM, or any other framework designed to create meaningful goals could outweigh proper team support by the leadership. Speaking of OKRs, we also ask: Can OKRs and JTBD co-exist?

Food for Agile Thought #284: Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Estimating Complexity, Dangers of Groupthink, Healthy Goals — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #283: Is Agile a Trojan Horse, Culture & Methods Trends 2021, Product Strategy Stack, Metrics of Transformations

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-03-12 News

TL; DR: Is Agile a Trojan Horse, Product Strategy Stack—Food for Agile Thought #283

Welcome to the 283rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,593 peers. This week, we ask: Is Agile a Trojan Horse for change? We also enjoy the March 2021 edition of the Culture & Methods Trends Report, learning that COVID-19 was the biggest driver of culture change and that there are dramatic differences between good and bad remote work cultures. Moreover, we introduce a framework on strategic interventions when coaching agile teams.

We then introduce a product strategy stack, including product leadership experiences from Tinder, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Airbnb. We summarize suggestions on setting practical Product Goals, and we discover an approach to Design Sprints that reduces its original time requirement from five days by 50 percent without sacrificing the outcome’s quality.

Lastly, we address wheel-spinning during transformations and how to overcome transformation theater and start delivering more value faster.

Food for Agile Thought #283: Is Agile a Trojan Horse, Culture & Methods Trends 2021, Product Strategy Stack, Metrics of Transformations — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #282: Self-Organization Does Not Work, Tools Don’t Matter, Projects to Products (Ebook), 3 Ways to Agile Product Creation

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-03-05 News

TL; DR: Self-Organization Does Not Work, Tools Don’t Matter—Food for Agile Thought #282

Welcome to the 282nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,507 peers. This week, we learn why self-organization does not work when your goal is creating a high-performance organization. We receive a free ebook on how to shift an organization’s focus from projects to products, and we ask: How much lean is in today’s “Agile?”

We then figure out how to breathe life into your Product (Development) Backlog by removing all ideas from it; we get advice on dealing with the executor, the manager, and the visionary among founders, and we address product managers’ obsession with tools.

Lastly, we discuss pragmatic, proven, and sometimes counter-intuitive approaches to develop faster.

Food for Agile Thought #282: Self-Organization Does Not Work, Tools Don’t Matter, Projects to Products (Ebook), 3 Ways to Agile Product Creation — Age-of-Product.com

Food for Agile Thought #281: Product-Led Companies, #NoProjects, 80/20 Rule for Product Managers, Root Cause Analysis

by Stefan Wolpers | 2021-02-26 News

TL; DR: Product-Led Companies, #NoProjects—Food for Agile Thought #281

Welcome to the 281st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,412 peers. This week, we learn to identify product-led companies; we reflect on the effects of top-down decisions on imposing agile frameworks without identifying problems first, and we remind us of signs that an organization lacks the ‘agile mindset’ yet pretends to be agile.

We then gain insight into how to innovate within Google after being acquired—or not. We suggest embracing Pareto’s principle to execute an effective product strategy by ruthless prioritization, and we acknowledge the importance of picking appropriate metrics to guide our product teams to success.

Lastly, we appreciate introducing critical root cause analysis techniques, from ‘5 Whys’ to ‘Pareto Analysis.’