Food for Agile Thought’s issue #151—shared with 18,292 peers—focuses on beyond budgeting and the emerging business agility trend. We also learn about a study that provides scientific proof for a familiar gut feeling among knowledge workers: open floor plans suck.
We then take a deep dive into product vision principles and why you should look beyond MMRs to differentiators if you want your product to succeed.
Finally, the results of the scrum master survey are in, delivering a benchmark for the all-important question: scrum master, whatchadoing all day?
Have a great week!
🏆 The Tip of the Week
(via Corporate Rebels): Beyond Budgeting — The Adaptive And Agile Management Model
Bjarte Bogsnes introduces the principles of Beyond Budgeting and explains why ‘Business Agility’ finally has become a trend.
Agile & Scrum
(via Royal Society Publishing): The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration
Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban report on the findings of a recent study on the usefulness of ‘open’ workspaces for knowledge workers.
In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.
(via Medium): #Why[Some Tool]
John Cutler on the tool question, the often resulting reflexes within an organization, its business value and Beyond Budgeting.
: Cynefin: A framework that grows for me all the time in its value and worth.
Paul Hobcraft explains the basic idea of the Cynefin framework and how it has proven to be useful when dealing with innovation and complexity.
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Product & Lean
(via Mind The Product): What we Learned at #mtpcon San Francisco 2018
Emily Tate summarizes the learnings from the recent #mtpcon San Francisco, from embracing the awkward to the Product Practitioner Oath.
: Why Your Startup Doesn't Invest Sufficiently in its Differentiators
Tomasz Tunguz reflects on minimum market requirements (MMR), neutralizers, and differentiators as integral parts of a product strategy.
📯 Yo Scrum Master, Whatchadoing all Day?
Scrum Master Duties: supposedly, a great scrum master serves only one scrum team — that's at least a popular narrative in the scrum community. Nevertheless, there is also a loud voice that doubts that approach: what would you do the whole day - with a single team? Aren't they supposed to become self-organizing over time? And if so, does the scrum then need a scrum master 24/7?
As I worked for years as a product owner on scrum teams without a dedicated scrum master-which was working well-I was curious to learn more about that question, too. Hence I ran a survey in late June and early July 2018, the results of which are presented here.
In total, 261 scrum masters participated in this non-representative survey in the two weeks before July 5th, 2018. 19 participants chose not to provide their consent to Google processing and to store their answers. Hence their contributions were deleted, resulting in a sample size of 242 responses.
Read More: Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team (Survey Results).
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- Hands-on Agile Webinar #3 on product backlog anti-patterns.
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🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
Read more: Food for Agile Thought #150: The Agile Manager, Changing Culture, Product Prioritization.