Food for Agile Thought #129: Mental Models, Resilience, Roadmap Questions, Combining Kanban and XP

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #129—shared with 14,709 peers—covers mental models relevant to your agile journey and shares the download link to an excellent book on team-centric agile software development. (Yub, it is free of charge.)

We then dive into organizational resilience through business agility, what your stakeholders want to know regarding your product roadmap, and why loving your customers’ problems will make your life so much easier.

Lastly, Intercom’s VP of Product created an overview what product people with an agile mindset can expect from the organization. (And the good folks at Intercom are checking a lot of the right boxes!)

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #129: Mental Models, Resilience, Roadmap Questions, Combining Kanban and XP

🏆 The Tip of the Week

Allan Kelly: Xanpan: Team-Centric Agile Software Development Combining Kanban and XP

Allan Kelly offers a free download of his new book ‘Xanpan: Team-Centric Agile Software Development Combining Kanban and XP.’

Mental Models & Agile

Lisa Crispin: Retrospectives for large teams with many sub-teams

Lisa Crispin explains her approach to running a retrospective with 40-plus people spread across several locations.

Slava Akhmechet: Mental models

Slava Akhmechet aggregated a handy list of mental models—well suited for your agile coaching endeavor.

Steve Denning (via Forbes): Achieving Organizational Resilience Through Business Agility

Steve Denning on resilience, disruption, and the changing view of what constitutes proper management nowadays.

📯 Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns

A burn-down chart tracks the progress of a team toward a goal by visualizing the remaining work in comparison to the available time. So far, so good. More interesting than reporting a status, however, is the fact that burn-down charts also visualize scrum anti-patterns of a team or its organization.

Learn more about discovering these anti-patterns that can range from systemic issues like queues outside a team’s sphere of influence and other organizational debt to a team’s fluency in agile practices.

Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns Early Finish Late Acceptance

Read More: Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns.

Product & Lean

Paul Adams (via Intercom): What makes Intercom different, and better, for Product people

Paul Adams put together a compelling list of Intercom’s advantages for product people with an agile mindset. You can almost use it as a sort of checklist for agility assessments.

Rich Mironov: Your Audience's Real Roadmap Questions

Rich Mironov shares a slightly stereotyped view of stakeholders and their questions concerning product roadmaps.

(via Product School): Solving People's Problems as a Product Manager by Facebook PM

Aigerim Shorman discusses the mechanics of the product development process and the communication needed to ensure transparency.

✋ Do Not Miss Out: Join the 2,575-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Team

I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack team and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.

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Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #128: Disrupting Companies, Scrum@Scale Guide, Information Radiators.

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