Food for Agile Thought’s issue #204—shared with 23,376 peers—turns to Scrum TPS to 3-5x quality and value; we learn how to weave strings of Liberating Structures to achieve a Scrum Team’s goals, and we adjust our approach to handling organizational change.
We then kill our product backlogs; we embrace the idea of #nocode MVPs, and we come back again to the question of user story sizing.
Lastly, we ask: how come that so many agile transformations still fail, given the wealth of knowledge accumulated on the topic over recent years?
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #203?
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🏆 The Essential Read
(via Product Coalition): Is Your Agile Transformation Failing, Too?
Ant Murphy asks: if we know that change is hard, why do a staggering amount of transformations still fail?
Agile & Scrum TPS
(via Scrum.org): Strategy Knotworking: turning ideas and ambitions into reality
Barry Overeem shares an example of how a Scrum Master can use Liberating Structures to help a Scrum Team turn their ideas and ambitions into reality.
(via InfoQ): Scrum & The Toyota Production System, Build Ultra-Powerful Teams
Pierre Jannez notes that marrying Scrum and TPS improves quality and value creation by an x3-x5 factor.
: …But Your Kids are Going to Love it
Len Lagestee points at the importance of understanding the current state before leaping ahead with a change approach.
📅 Liberating Structures Scrum Workshop — From Product Strategy to Roadmap to Sprint Review
Join us for another exciting LS Scrum workshop on September 7th, 2019, in Berlin. Following up on our first workshop, We will continue exploring LS microstructures, weave them into strings and apply those to Scrum’s soft underbelly — the product side, or figuring out what is worth building. Please note that this class is an advanced Liberating Structures Scrum workshop. The class is not suited for beginners to Liberating Structures. Also, you need to have a good understanding of both Scrum as well as product management in general. The workshop language is English.
Product & Lean
and (via Justinmind): Jason Fried wants to delete my backlog
Justin Jackson shares a short video with Jason Fried, in which Jason advocates to kill product backlogs, being ‘dangerous, horrible’ things.
(via Free Code Camp): How We Built Our Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
John Saddington shares the story of how Yen.io started—without coding.
(via DZone): What Is the Right Size for a User Story?
Allan Kelly shares his criteria that a User Story should meet—independent of size.
📯 Scrum First Principles
Popularized by Elon Musk, utilizing first principles thinking to solve problems in an innovative, creative, and less biased way has proven popular in the tech community. Given that its sibling empiricism is an integral part of Scrum as a framework, applying Scrum first principles thinking is also a useful exercise.
Learn more: Scrum First Principles — How to Elon Musk the Scrum Guide.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💯 🇩🇪 May 19-20, 2026 | Guaranteed: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 💯 🇬🇧 May 28 to June 25, 2026 | Guaranteed: AI4Agile BootCamp #7 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 8, 2026 | GUARANTEED: Claude Cowork: Stop Prompting. Start Delegating. (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $129 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 9, 2026 | GUARANTEED: HoA 74: "CLAUDE.md" — The One File That Makes AI Remember How You Work. (English) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 10-July 2, 2026 | GUARANTEED: Claude Cowork BootCamp #2 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | $249 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 11, 2026 | GUARANTEED: HoA 75: Token Economics. (English) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🇩🇪 June 30-July 1, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 July 1, 2026 | GUARANTEED: AI 4 Agile Course v3 — Master AI for Agile Practitioners (English; Self-paced Online Course) | Self-Paced Online Course | $149 incl. 19% VAT (If applicable.) |
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 1,575-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
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