Food for Agile Thought’s issue #140—shared with 16,912 peers—dives into making smart decisions (under uncertainty) and feels with the agile hero of Greek-style transition tragedy. (To counter this possibly frustrating reading experience, we also feature the thoughts of a CEO how to transition in the right way.)
We also analyze the universe of “minimum viable [add something of your choice here],” and we look beyond the traditional NPS metric to define customer success—there is more out there.
Lastly, we get a better understanding of why so many organizations excel at optimizing one thing incrementally and utterly fail at anything innovative. (Are organizations thus probably damned to keep the problem alive they wanted to fix initially?)
Have a great week!
🏆 The Essential Read: Smart Decisions
(via Farnam Street): The Ultimate Guide to Making Smart Decisions
Shane Parrish advocates making better decisions through intelligent preparation and understanding.
Agile & Scrum
(via AgileCraft): The Death of an Agile Transformation in Four Acts
Steve Elliott tells the tale of an agile hero whose journey to failure in a big company sounds unsurprisingly familiar.
(via Corporate Rebels): A CEO's Perspective On How To Start An Organizational Transformation
Matt Bell on his approach to starting an agile transition by looking at the HOW (values), then thinking about WHY and finally looking at WHAT we are doing.
📯 From the Blog: Scrum Stakeholder Anti-Patterns
Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in scrum stakeholder anti-patterns which easily can impede any agile transition.
Read More: Scrum Stakeholder Anti-Patterns.
Product & Lean
(via Gurock & TestRail): MVE and MVP: Defining the Difference
Johanna Rothman defines the many possible “minimums” when we think about stories and roadmaps.
(via ProdPad): Finding Customer Success: Looking Beyond Metrics
Andrea Saez explains why ProdPad is neither using NPS, nor CSAT, or SLAs to track customer success. What is working for them is something different.
(via Inc.com): I've Studied Hundreds of Organizations. Here's Why Most Can't Innovate
Greg Satell analyzes the efficiency trap of incrementalism and its contribution to the innovator’s dilemma.
📅 Upcoming Webinars
Download your invitations now — there are no more than 100 seats available:
- May 8th, 2018: Webinar #3: Product Backlog Anti-Patterns
- May 22nd, 2018: Webinar #4: Agile Failure Patterns 2.0
Note: All webinars are aired from 06:00 to 07:00 PM CEST. (That is 12:00 to 01:00 PM EDT or 09:00 to 10:00 AM PDT.)
📺 Subscribe to Age of Product’s Brand-New Youtube Channel
Now available on the Age of Product Youtube channel:
- Hands-on Agile Webinar #1 on product discovery anti-patterns.
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If you like to join now all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
Read more: Food for Agile Thought #139: Self-Organization at Haier, Fear and Trust, Contra Metrics, Sunk Costs.
