Food for Agile Thought #158: Semco Transformation, Trust, 10 Product Commandments, Unfounded Confidence

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #158—shared with 18,935 peers—visits the poster child of self-managed organizations—Semco—, we deal with building trust in teams, and we learn why agile companies no longer require plans.

We appreciate Roman Pichler’s sprint planning tips & tricks for product owners, we dive into the commandments of outstanding products, and we understand how falling in love with a solution can wreck a whole organization.

Lastly, we come back to product discovery and learn a new approach how to reinvent a strategy to figure out what’s worth building.

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #158: Semco Transformation, Trust, 10 Product Commandments, Unfounded Confidence

🏆 The Essential Read: Semco Transformation

(via Corporate Rebels): Fixing Work That Sucks: Semco's Step-By-Step Transformation

Corporate Rebels interviewed Ricardo Semler, Clovis Bojikian and Semco workers how the poster child of self-management is doing.

Agile & Scrum

Roman Pichler: Sprint Planning Tips for Product Owners

Roman Pichler shares tips for product owners on how to get more out of Scrum’s most important event—the sprint planning.

Rob Wortham: How Do I Foster Trust Within My Team?

Tanner Wortham reflects on the most challenging task for any Scrum Master.

Scott Adams: We Don’t Need a Plan. We Are an Agile Company.

The pointy-haired boss suggests to move fast and fix the mistakes on the go.

🏋️‍♂️ Upcoming Workshops in Berlin

October 19th, 2018: The Agile Fluency Game ™ — A Realistic Simulation of Agile Practices.

November 15-16th, 2018: Business Agility XBA Training (XSCALE Alliance).

📯 The Meta-Retrospective

A meta-retrospective is an excellent exercise to foster collaboration within the extended team, create a shared understanding of the big picture, and immediately create valuable action-items. It comprises of the team members of one or several product teams—or representative from those—and stakeholders. Participants from the stakeholder side are people from the business as well as customers. Meta-retrospectives are useful both as a regular event, say once a quarter, or after achieving a particular milestone, for example, a specific release of the product.

Meta-Retrospective — Age-of-Product.com

Read more: The Meta-Retrospective—How To Get Customers and Stakeholders Onboard.

Product & Lean

Jeff Davidson (via The Startup): The 10 Commandments of Good Products

Jeff Davidson examines why we buy what we buy, and how a product ‘spreads’ to reach profitability.

Hope Gurion (via Insight Venture Partners): The Best Product Teams Crave Truth and Do Math

Hope Gurion analyzes the failure of PlayPump, rooted in the unfounded feeling of certainty among its makers.

Matteo Cavucci (via Avanscoperta Blog): Product Discovery Strategy with EventStorming and Lean Value Tree

Matteo Cavucci shares a success story on how to invent a new strategy to figure out what’s worth building.

📺 Join 675-plus Agile Peers on Youtube

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Scrum Master Interview Question: free download of the most popular ebook on Scrum Master job interviews — by Age-of-Product

🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food Agile for Thought #157: Agile 2018, Mediocrity, Peter Principle, Business vs. Technical Debt..

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