Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 9th, 2017—shared with 7,402 peers—celebrates the 11th Annual State of Agile Report by VersionOne, despite the fact that it reveals a most unsettling news about SAFe.
We ask whether a scrum master should aim for putting herself out of a job, or whether having more than one team at a time is sustainable. We also learn how to support the product owner (and the team) in slicing user stories in the right way.
On the product side, this issue is all about dual-track agile, product discovery, early adopters, and getting the minimum viable product right. Okay, one for the road: ever heard about clarity metrics? Gotcha… 😎
Lastly: We risk a glimpse at the dark side of product design with Uber’s behavioral psychology experiments. Thank you, Travis!
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 2nd, 2017—shared with 7,272 peers—revisits the agile mindset, links to the best new podcast on agile issues in months and provides hardcore statistics and scientific proof that trust works and is essential for building an agile organization.
On the product side, Ellen Gottesdiener provides insight into the confusing discussion about the minimum viable product, we learn to identify anti-patterns that point at a dysfunctional product organization, and we breathe a sigh of relief: no coding required when you want to be a product mensch.
Lastly: We learn about Elon Musk’s passion for preventing humanity from falling victim to machine-learning overlords. (A good read if you’re struggling to understand the difference between the Terminator, and the narrow AI, that will put myriads of oncologists out of work.)
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 26th, 2017—shared with 7,083 peers—provides you with proven techniques to avoid “half-arsed” agile, draws the line between Scrum Master and Agile Coach, and invites you to listen to Hollary and Scrump. Yub, make Scrum great again.
On the product side, Melissa Perri helps you to identify crappy product management jobs in advance, and Marty Cagan gives away his favorite PM interview question. Also, Ideo shares six insights that help you crack innovation.
Lastly: We enjoy a two-hour long podcast on self-organization, empowerment, and entrepreneurship with Ricardo Semler & Mr. Ferriss. (Perfect for the gym, accounting, or cooking. I tried all three of those.)
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 19th, 2017—shared with 6,872 peers—answers the question whether you’re a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or both. We like Mike Cohn’s free user story training class to avoid user story smells. And if you have no clue how to pull off a sticky without making it curl, we can help with that, too.
On the product side, Des Traynor of Intercom provides hands-on advice where to allocate blood, sweat, and tears. And, by the way, you’re not the CEO of the product. Sorry. But probably you’re a Product Owner and not a product manager. Roman Pichler provides some insight on this discussion.
Lastly: How radical candor builds kick-ass teams, and what superstars and rock stars have got to do with it.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 12th, 2017—shared with 6,758 peers—dips into agile frameworks, and organizational aspects of culture, and how the first usually fail to change the latter. We also learn how to make working in distributed teams suck less.
On the product side, we dive deep into how to apply Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle to chart a new idea or venture, we learn why rigorous, and ruthless prioritization is king, and that embracing bad product ideas can lead to insights that allow creating something people love.
Lastly: David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp reflects on Silicon Valley’s religion of growth at all costs.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 5th, 2017—shared with 6,621 peers—focuses on the subtlety of transitioning organizations to agile ways of working. Jurgen Appelo believes in shapeshifter like flexibility, we unbundle our usual nemesis, the “agile” middle management, and we borrow some insights from Crisp’s decision to go without a CEO.
On the product side, we dive deep into handling the “we know what build syndrome,” and recall the learnings from the innovator’s dilemma and minimum viable product concepts. And we learn to stop fooling ourselves by acknowledging that we are caught in mental models.
Lastly: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely explains why we so often sabotage ourselves – despite knowing better.