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!
🏆 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
: 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.
: How Do I Foster Trust Within My Team?
Tanner Wortham reflects on the most challenging task for any Scrum Master.
: 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.
Read more: The Meta-Retrospective—How To Get Customers and Stakeholders Onboard.
Product & Lean
(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.
(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.
(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
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel:
- Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment: Is Agile a Fad or Trend?
- Agile Failure Patterns 2.0
- Product Owner Anti-Patterns
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Join the 3,850-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
Read more: Food Agile for Thought #157: Agile 2018, Mediocrity, Peter Principle, Business vs. Technical Debt..