Category: News

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 5th, 2017—shared with 6,508 peers—focuses on team building, how to provide feedback to hardly bearable teammates, and why radical candor is good for business and your soul. Be warned, though, transparency has a dark side, too.

We also dive deep into how the best product teams evolve beyond Agile and Lean, how to utilize guerilla research to create excellent products, and what anti-patterns to avoid if you are pursuing a career in product management.

Last but not least: We discuss patterns and ethics of how today’s technology seeks to manipulate us.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 29th, 2017—shared with 6,369 peers—uncovers the Zombie Scrum apocalypse, and other anti-patterns of organizations stuck in their transformation process.

We advocate self-organization by asking questions and thus resisting the urge to ‘fix’ an urgent problem. Also, we revisit the ‘done’-question with Wally: bugs or no bugs?

David Cancel claims: Agile is dead, long live customer-centricity! And he provides a free ebook to prove his point. Speaking of customer-centricity: feature flags can come quite handy to achieve this objective. Learn how to apply them. And while you’re at it, build more trust with your stakeholders, and assess yourself as a Product Owner.

Last but not least: We follow Uber and Airbnb on their way to disrupt the taxi and hotel industry — in less than a decade. (Schumpeter would have been fascinated.)

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 22nd, 2017—shared with 6,173 peers—wants you to free your mind (and the agile rest will follow): Efficiency and creativity don’t make good companions, particularly if you have to resort to guerrilla innovation.

We also bust the myth that there are too many meetings in Scrum—the so familiar post-Scrum-honeymoon whining from developers.

We then dive deep into how to turn ideas into validated learnings and those into actionable user stories for the product backlog. By the way, given the abundance of ideas, you may consider learning how to say ‘no’ to create an outstanding product. Find out how to do so without burning bridges.

Last but not least: Learn how to intelligently fail while hacking the innovation culture of your organization—which is particularly useful if you are not working for Google, for example.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 15th, 2017—shared with 5,934 peers—celebrates 21 years of Scrum with Ken Schwaber and covers Product Owner patterns such as the part-time PO, or how to embed the PO more effectively into the Scrum team’s daily work.

We also learn that Holacracy can add purpose to organizations that use Scrum, and that Scrum even works well at home with four Lil’ Rascals.

We then dive deep into risk-mitigation and how to avoid product failure, and ask ourselves: “Is there a plural of priority?” (Yes, I know, a lot of product roadmaps pretend there is one…) So, why not learn storytelling with Christina Wodtke, and turn ‘priorities’ into ‘priority’ again?

Last but not least: A brand new, free ebook from Hands-on Agile covering 42 interview questions for the Product Owner role is available. You can download it right here.

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 8th, 2017—shared with 5,703 peers—looks into agile transitions at scale: hybrid patterns, success stories, and principles of organizational design.

We learn that the Jira people discovered eight traits of successful teams and that getting to done requires a team to accept ownership and accountability.

We also revisit the product manager v. Product Owner debate and have a look at 2016 from the product management community perspective. Also, we learn about the hard-wired cave-man inside of us and what implications this has for product design.

Last but not least, Erin Griffith reports on the growing list of startup scandals, bordering on fraud. (Yub, my beloved Theranos is part of that article, too.)