Food for Agile Thought’s issue #152—shared with 18,406 peers—focuses agile estimates: are they always waste or are there situations where agile estimates are useful? Moreover, in the latter case how to make sure that you provide the right estimates?
We also enjoy a sample chapter from a good book on product design, listing nine critical tools, and shed light on the questions whether infrastructure teams need product management, too.
Finally, John Cutler shares his observations on how coaching engagements often start and also come to an end. (Let’s create a list of these signs — so we can prepare yourselves for next time when it is our turn.)
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #151—shared with 18,292 peers—focuses on beyond budgeting and the emerging business agility trend. We also learn about a study that provides scientific proof for a familiar gut feeling among knowledge workers: open floor plans suck.
We then take a deep dive into product vision principles and why you should look beyond MMRs to differentiators if you want your product to succeed.
Finally, the results of the scrum master survey are in, delivering a benchmark for the all-important question: scrum master, whatchadoing all day?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #150—shared with 18,194 peers—focuses on the role of the agile manager — from the perspective of the incumbent middle management. We also address changing the culture: what six steps are required and why putting up new value posters is futile.
We then take a deep dive into product prioritization and how to figure out what is worth building. Moreover, Andrew Chen provides a great collection of essays for those working on marketplaces.
Finally, the question of whether Scrum is iterative or incremental is answered.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #149—shared with 18,075 peers—addresses the multitasking fallacy many managers suffer from, how to design an organization that supports agile teams tasked with solving customers’ problems, and what to do when your Scrum team gets too large.
We also enjoy Marty Cagan’s follow-up post—I hope you have read ‘The Revenge of the PMO’—as well as Teressa Torres’ pitch to continuously challenge your beliefs. (Running user interviews seems to be a good starting point.)
However, what if ‘Agile’ is merely a cult, something we made up collectively that is of no importance when it comes to creating outstanding products?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #148—shared with 17,986 peers—focuses on unagile SAFe ®, how the PMO strikes back, and whether ‘agile’ makes sense at all.
We learn from Marty Cagan that most large organization do not (yet) understand the different concepts of project-orientation vs. product-orientation. Which is a good reason to also dive into the particularities of enterprise product management.
However, there is hope: K2K managed to turn more than 70 organizations into self-organizing flourishing entities. Learn how this happened.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #147—shared with 17,882 peers—addresses business agility and what is required to make it happen. We learn that merely scaling ‘agile’ is not the path as business agility also needs changes of a different nature. Overcoming the traditional budgeting process, for example.
Speaking of which, Steve Denning contributes ten axioms that make traditional managers anxious; ridiculing ‘agile’ is no longer an option to deal with it.
Lastly, we borrow six tips to handle demanding stakeholders without burning bridges, and we learn which low-hanging fruits to pick to make an excellent first impression as a newly hired product manager.
