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Food for Agile Thought #103: Agile Misconceptions, Retro + Product Thinking Exercises, Being PM #1

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

Ryan Mac (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.

Matt Sakaguchi (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.

Misha Chellam (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

Alex Kistenev (via Medium): 10 Exercises to Train Product Thinking

Alex Kistenev shares ten quick and easy brain training techniques improving your work routine.

Taylor Wescoatt (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.

Andy Carvell: Minimum Viable Analytics

Andy Carvell explains common traps of ‘data-driven’ teams and suggests a lean approach to analytics instead.

Ruben Ugarte (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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Categories: News
Stefan Wolpers: Stefan, based near Hamburg, Germany, has worked for 18-plus years as a Product Manager, Product Owner, Agile Coach, and Scrum Master. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org and the author of Pearson’s “Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide.” He has developed B2C as well as B2B software, for startups as well as corporations, including a former Google subsidiary. Stefan curates the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and organizes the Hands-on Agile Conference, a Barcamp for agile practitioners.
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