Food for Agile Thought #146: Finding Agile Metrics, Product Bets, Business Agility, Bad Pressure

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #146—shared with 17,791 peers—addresses finding agile metrics, how to play the product game safe and lose, and why BDD is an integral part of business agility.

We also ask yourselves: Should an agile coach rather be an organizational psychotherapist? Or what are you doing all day if you’re supporting a single team as a scrum master?

Lastly, our gut feeling is confirmed that innovation does not happen under pressure as well as that ‘saying yes’ is not scaling technique to build successful products. (Fortunately, there are also six ways how to accomplish growth without trying to be everybody’s darling.)

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #146: Finding Agile Metrics, Product Bets, Business Agility, Bad Pressure

🏆 The Tip of the Week: Finding Agile Metrics

Julia Wester: DevOpsCon18 Berlin: Finding Metrics that Matter and Using them Safely

Julia Wester answers the #1 question when it comes to metrics: How do we know what’s important enough to measure?

Finding Agile Metrics & Scrum

Bartosz Rakowski (via Medium): How to bet safe and lose

Bartosz Rakowski shares a typical interaction pattern between the senior management and product teams: how to develop the next product?

John Ferguson Smart: BDD and the four pillars of business agility

John Ferguson Smart visualizes the four critical elements of business agility: From BDD to DevOps.

Bob Marshall: Agile Coach to Organisational Psychotherapist

Bob Marshall reflects on his (limited) impact as an agile coach and why he decided to shift his focus to organizational psychotherapy.

⁉️ Survey: What Are You Doing the Whole Day as a Scrum Master of One Team?

In other words: What are your regular chores as a scrum master supporting a single team?

Rumor has it that a great scrum master supports one team at a time. If that is true, how do you spend your time with the team members helping them to become self-organizing? Let’s gather some data and answer the question! (This survey is anonymous.)

Survey: What Are You Doing the Whole Day as a Scrum Master of One Team?

Participate in the survey now: What Are You Doing the Whole Day?

Product & Lean

Julie Zhuo (via Medium): Good Pressure, Bad Pressure

Julie Zhuo points at a crucial truth: Groundbreaking work does not come from an environment of stress, anxiety, and fear of failure.

René Rosendahl (via pendo.io): Why “Yes” Doesn’t Scale

René Rosendahl advocates shifting from a customer-centric mindset to product-centric mindset if you want to grow your product.

Gino Chirio (via Harvard Business Review): The 6 Ways to Grow a Company

Gino Chirio introduces a framework of how to allocate budget to innovation areas.

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🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #145: Make Agile Work, Graphic Facilitation, Managing HIPPOs.

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