Category: News

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of May 21st, 2017—shared with 8,724 peers—focuses on team building. We learn how to build a team for success and how to preserve its health by fighting criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. We understand that teams do not disrupt industry when they are kept in functional silos and that providing too much support as a coach can be harmful.

On the product side, we dive deep into the delicate balance between product discovery and product delivery. Also, we have to overcome a long-time bias that engineers want to code and nothing but to code.

Lastly: You are interested in Jeff Bezos’ secret sauce? Read on and find out what the best transformational leaders do according to this brand-new study.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of May 14th, 2017 is shared with 8,493 peers. Again, we ask the heretic questions: (Why) Do engineers hate agile? Or, does “agile” need refactoring because of warring factions of the community? And is there indeed a schizophrenic dichotomy noticeable?

On the product side, we dive deep into continuous everything, from dual track development, to cost of delay and mental models of successful product creators. (If causal loop or Pareto efficiency are all Greek to you, maybe you should cancel lunch? #justsaying)

Lastly: We learn from Mr. Business Model Canvas—Alex Osterwalder—how to recognize a problem of a target market and address it with a product.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of May 7th, 2017 is shared with 8,337 peers. We deal with various aspects of change: metaphors, agile OKRs, thirsty plants, and misconceptions. And we wholeheartedly support Tanner’s idea of actively doing nothing as a scrum master.

On the product side, we start with another round of anti-patterns in product development. Then we switch to how to do it right, and we end with why you should not confuse alignment with an agreement.

Lastly: We understand the magic of disruptive innovation disguised as toys and appealing to the inner child.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 30th, 2017—shared with 7,968 peers—features two heavyweight agile champions on why scaling agile is futile. We also can confirm: the further east you go the less Scrum works. Sorry, we needed to address the elephant in the room.

On the product side, we dive deep into how to kill features and why this is important for any aspiring creator of a great product. (Spoiler alert: those embrace simplicity.) We also talk about the “cigarettes” of the B2C web industry, and what it takes to get ‘lean startup’ as a concept going in an enterprise.

Lastly: we learn about the unfortunate trend of creating local maxima due to a lack of long-term thinking. Enjoy Labor Day!

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 23rd, 2017—shared with 7,693 peers—celebrates lasagne from Colgate, pardon me: failure, and why C-level execs believe in big bang agile transitions. (Of course, we know they need passion from ones in the trenches, and Thoughtworks believes that, too.)

We then dive deep into the fetish of estimations, and why agile process-fetishists might turn the DoR into a stage-gate. (Sneaking in the dark side through the backdoor, so to speak.)

On the product side, we have another look at our nemesis, the sales team, and we learn why chefs supposedly make good product managers. Lean startup aficionados might enjoy the MVP, MMF, and MRF analysis.

Lastly: Up your game of convincing other people of your ideas with storytelling and learn right from the source.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 16th, 2017—shared with 7,528 peers—enjoys in this issue lipstick agile, tragile, and wagile. Also, we learn why US-made tomato paste represents a success story for self-management aficionados, who – by the way – may soon be joined by venture capitalists like Fred Wilson.

We then dive deep into hands-on tips on how to improve distributed agile in general, and the remote product backlog refinement in particular.

On the product side, it is again all about product discovery, outcome vs. output, real-time, continuous user research, and how Jeff Bezos intends to keep Amazon relevant – by inventing on behalf of customers.

Lastly: If you haven’t yet contributed to the ‘Scrum Master Salary Report 2017’ hurry up and join 435 peers who already did so. And one more thing: We have a list of 400 Slack Communities. Just in case, you may free time at hands.