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Food for Agile Thought #225: Pair Programming, Probabilistic Forecasting, HiPPO Training, Idea Generation 3.0

TL; DR: Probabilistic Forecasting, HiPPO Training—Food for Agile Thought #225

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #225—shared with 24,837 peers—addresses the importance of pair programming; we seek to excel at predicting the future with probabilistic forecasting, and we appreciate an outsight view on Scrum by following sticky notes.

We also point at a crucial stakeholder management competence of Product Owners and Scrum Masters; we enjoy new games and exercises for ideation purposes, and we consider making our product worse for the sake of improving it.

Lastly, we embrace the coining of decaf resistance—it is good to know that a habitual behavior in so many organizations now has a name.

Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #224?

🗞 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 Tip of the Week

Nina Siessegger and Birgitta Böckeler: On Pair Programming

Birgitta Böckeler and Nina Siessegger share their belief that pair programming is vital for collaborative teamwork and high-quality software.

Agile, Probabilistic Forecasting & Scrum

Julia Wester (via Scrum.org): Create Faster and More Accurate Forecasts using Probabilities

Julia Wester advocates using a statistical method to support Product Owners in making forecasts.

(via epicpeople): 📖 ´(Fr)agile objects: Thinking Scrum through Post-It Notes

Isabel Lafuente and Wilson Prata look at how Scrum is practiced, by following Post-its notes. (Access to the article requires a free account.)

(via Naomi Stanford): Decaf, pragmatic and real resistance

Naomi Stanford introduces three types of organizational resistance.


Product & Lean

(via Mind The Product): 📺 How to Train Your Hippo

Ozlem Yuce delves into how we can better deal with the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) in our organizations.

(via IDEO U): 🎙 10 Activities To Generate Better Ideas

Brendan Boyle shares ten games and exercises to breathe life into your ideation process. (Both in writing and as a podcast.)

Oleg Yakubenkov: Experiments where you make your product worse – the most underrated product manager tool

Oleg Yakubenkov suggests turning the order of things upside-down.

📅 Professional Scrum Master Training PSM I + Liberating Structures — Berlin, February 18-20, 2020

This extended PSM class adds a third day to the Professional Scrum Master training that focuses on the application of Liberating Structures to Scrum Events such as the Sprint Retrospective or the Sprint Review — to apply the PSM training immediately to practical problems. The class will be offered in English.

For those who are interested in applying Liberating Structures as a Scrum Master, we made only the third day of the training class available.

Book your ticket right here:

Learn more: 📅 Professional Scrum Master Training PSM I + Liberating Structures — Berlin, February 18-20, 2020.

📯 Product Mindset and Ownership in Scrum Teams

There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule. How is that supposed to scale, you might ask, isn’t that approach turning the Product Owner into the Scrum team’s bottleneck, impeding value creation rather than spearheading it? Well, cargo cult Scrum might end up in that dead-end. The trick to avoiding this fate is to start including the Development Team as early as possible in Product Backlog management which requires a product mindset.

Learn more about how to kick-off this process with an initial day-long product mindset workshop for your Scrum team.

📅 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

See all upcoming classes here.

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 1,875-plus Agile Peers on Youtube

Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel:

✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn about Probabilistic Forecasting: Join the 6,625-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 #224: Descaling Manifesto, Cultivating Ownership, Release Planning, 5th Product Manager Report.

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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