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Food for Agile Thought #204: Scrum & TPS, Strategy Knotworking, Kill Your Product Backlog, Youtube as an MVP

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?

🗞 Do you want to get this article in your inbox in the future? You can sign up here for our weekly ‘Food of Agile Thought newsletter’ and join 29k other subscribers.

🏆 The Essential Read

Ant Murphy (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

Barry Overeem (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.

Len Lagestee: ...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.

Learn more: 📅 Liberating Structures Scrum Workshop — From Product Strategy to Roadmap to Sprint Review — Berlin, September 7, 2019.

Product & Lean

Jason Fried and Justin Jackson (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.

John Saddington (via Free Code Camp): How We Built Our Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

John Saddington shares the story of how Yen.io started—without coding.

Allan Kelly (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
🖥 🇩🇪 January 28-31, 2025 Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Feburary 4-6, 2025 GUARANTEED: Hands-on Agile 2025: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility (English) Live Virtual Conference FREE
🖥 🇬🇧 February 12-13, 2025 Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 February 27, 2025 GUARANTEED: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS; English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €749 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 March 6-April3, 2025 GUARANTEED: Align, Discover, Deliver: The Product Backlog Management Cohort Class (English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Cohort €499 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 🇩🇪 March 11-12, 2025 Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 🇬🇧 March 26-27, 2025 Professional Scrum Master Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €1,299 incl. 19% VAT
🖥 🇩🇪 April 10, 2025 Professional Product Discovery and Validation Class (PPDV; German; Live Virtual Class) Live Virtual Class €749 incl. 19% VAT

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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✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn about Scrum TPS: Join the 5,850-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community

I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.

If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.

🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #203: Zombie Scrum, Black Mirror Ethics, Apex Predators in Agile, How to Product Update.

Categories: News
Stefan Wolpers: Stefan, based near Hamburg, Germany, has worked for 18-plus years as a Product Manager, Product Owner, Agile Coach, and Scrum Master. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org and the author of Pearson’s “Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide.” He has developed B2C as well as B2B software, for startups as well as corporations, including a former Google subsidiary. Stefan curates the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and organizes the Hands-on Agile Conference, a Barcamp for agile practitioners.
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