Food for Agile Thought’s issue #119—shared with 12,907 peers—addresses the decision process in groups, how XScale’s business agility approach works, and why cargo cult agile usually means running in circles.
We share a handy guide on how to deal with engineering teams, and why you need to include them in any persona creation activity. We also have a look at Buffer’s 6-week product cycle.
Lastly, we cover why product management by committee is doomed from the start, and we learn about how hard it is as a corporation to get from a big idea to a sustainable product.
Have a great week!
🏆 The Tip of the Week
(via TED Talks): Mariano Sigman and Dan Ariely: How can groups make good decisions?
Mariano Sigman and Dan Ariely provide insight into their experiments how we interact — as groups — to reach decisions.
Business Agility & Scrum
(via finaplana ag): A Game without Thrones: Business Agility
Christopher Young describes ‘A Game w/o Thrones’—Xscale’s pivotal game to achieve business agility by self-organization.
: Five Lessons I'm Thankful I Learned in my Agile Career
Mike Cohn shares five lessons that have been fundamental to his career.
(via Basecamp): Running in Circles: Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently
Ryan Singer on why ‘Agile’ so often is equated with speed when doing the wrong things, building to specs, and getting distracted are the real problems.
(via Mind The Product): A Guide to Collaborating With and Motivating Your Engineering Team
Kunal Punjabi provides a handy guide for collaborating with the engineering team.
📯 From the Blog: Create Personas with the Help of the Engineers
Creating valuable software requires knowing the customer—we all agree on that, right? The first question that then comes to mind is how to support this product discovery process in a meaningful manner in an agile environment? And the second question follows swiftly: who shall participate in the process—designers and business analysts or the engineers, too?
Read More: Create Personas with the Help of the Engineers.
Product & Lean
(via Buffer): Inside Our Product Process at Buffer: 6 Week Cycles and How We Run Them
Katie Womersley explains how the six-week cycles of Buffer’s product and engineering team work.
(via UserVoice): Product Management by Committee: A Recipe for Disaster
Cliff Gilley elaborates why the approach of ‘let’s all get together and decide, as a team, where we want the product to go’ is doomed from the start.
and (via InnovationExcellence): Crossing the Internal Chasm in Corporate Innovation
Ralph Ohr and Frank Mattes dive into the obstacles and challenges corporations face when trying to turn ‘big ideas’ into substantial businesses.
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Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
Read more: Food for Agile Thought #118: Scrum Troubles, Brilliant Jerks, How to Experiment, Sprint Review for POs.