Food for Agile Thought’s issue #103—shared with 10,283 peers—covers a sad case of failed product discovery. (Yub, SoundCloud.) We also deal with agile misconceptions and hence expectation management for agile transitions, and how to create your agile workspace.
We revisit Google’s learnings on how to create effective teams, pick up ten mental exercises to up your product game, and learn that 15% of product people run weekly experiments.
Lastly, we dive deep into product analytics: what are the data traps to avoid, what is lean analytics, and when to start with what tools and techniques.
Have a great week!
🏆 Tip of the Week
(via Buzzfeed): The Inside Story Of SoundCloud's Collapse
Ryan Mac reports on SoundCloud and how it all came crashing down. A sad tale of failing to get product discovery right.
Agile Misconceptions & Scrum
(via The Clever PM): Agile Transitions - Managing Expectations
The Clever PM dissects common presumptions and preconceptions related to agile transitions and explains how to counter them.
(via Lean Enterprise Inst): Developing Your Obeya, Stage-by-Stage
Working in an agile organization requires a suitable workspace, and John Drogosz explains how to develop yours.
(via InfoQ): What Google Learned about Creating Effective Teams
Matt Sakaguchi talks in this video about some of the practical research Google has done around building effective teams.
(via Medium): Flashcards to Learn 168 Cognitive Biases
Misha Chellam turned Buster Benson’s epic post on cognitive biases into Quizlet flash cards.
From the Blog: The Retrospective Exercises Repository
How to prevent retrospective boredom? One way to achieve that is never to repeat the same combination of retrospective exercises twice.
Avoiding repetitions might sound like much work for a single team. However, if your product delivery organization comprises of more than one Scrum team, I can highly recommend creating a retrospective exercises repository as it improves the quality of the retrospectives and saves much time if you share the retrospective exercises with your fellow scrum masters.
Read More: The Retrospective Exercises Repository.
Product & Lean
(via Medium): 10 Exercises to Train Product Thinking
Alex Kistenev shares ten quick and easy brain training techniques improving your work routine.
(via Mind The Product): Being the First Product Manager
Taylor Wescoatt works at Seedcamp and helps startups to understand product thinking—from prioritization to dual track agile.
(via Alpha): How frequently do product managers run experiments and ship new features?
Sam Henick reports on Alpha’s recent survey that evaluated how frequently product managers develop new features and run experiments.
: Minimum Viable Analytics
Andy Carvell explains common traps of ‘data-driven’ teams and suggests a lean approach to analytics instead.
(via ConversionXL): Product Analytics: A Comprehensive Guide to Using Data for Better Product Decisions
Ruben Ugarte details analytics tools and techniques to create a better product.
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