TL; DR: Serendipity-Driven Innovation, Biases at Work — Food for Agile Thought #255
Welcome to the 255th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,874 peers. This week, we embrace serendipity-driven innovation; we analyze the secret work of cognitive biases, and we delve deeper into Amazon’s “disagree but commit” principle.
We then figure out how to lift the collaboration between product and engineering to the next level; we enjoy product leadership lessons from the UK’s Ministry of Justice digital team, and we promise to replace old-fashioned product requirement documents.
Lastly, we consider creating a user manual for ourselves to improve communication with our teammates.
Did you miss last week’s Food for Agile Thought’s issue #254?
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Serendipity-Driven Innovation
(via InfoQ): 📺 Managing for Serendipity
Liz Keogh looks at how innovation often happens through unexpected side-effects, allowing new ideas to emerge.
👉 🔬 Join the Agile Metrics Survey 2020 — Start Your Contribution now!
Agile & Scrum
(via The Liberators): In-Depth: How Biases Easily Distort Our Beliefs (In The Workplace)
Christiaan Verwijs delves into the secret life of eight cognitive and social biases and their impact.
: A User Guide To Working With You
Julie Zhuo describes her take on creating a user manual for yourself.
(via TechTello): Agree To Disagree vs Disagree And Commit: How To Disagree The Right Way
Vinita Bansal points at why "agree to disagree" does not work and advocates for an alternative.
📅 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master (PSM II) Online Training — September 15-18, 2020
This advanced Scrum Master training (PSM II) is an official Scrum.org class for advanced Scrum Masters, including the industry-acknowledged PSM II certification. The PSM II training class is designed as a live virtual class of 4 h per day from 9 to 13 o’clock CEST and will be offered in English.
Learn more: 📅 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master (PSM II) Live Virtual Class: September 15-18, 2020.
Product & Lean
: Ask the EM: How Can I work Better with My Product Manager, as an Engineering Lead?
Gergely Orosz details what a healthy a product/engineering relationship looks like and suggests steps on how to get there.
: 5 product leadership lessons learnt from the UK’s Ministry of Justice Digital team
Jock Busuttil shares lessons learned from digital transformations and working with autonomous, empowered delivery teams.
(via Product Coalition): How To Write Product Requirements That People Would Read
David Wang proposes a different way of creating actionable product requirements.
📯 18 Signs of a Systemic Toxic Team Culture
What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. While they try to become more appealing to product and software developers, they still have difficulties understanding what it takes to build an attractive product/engineering culture.
Learn more about typical anti-patterns and signs that an organization is causing a toxic team culture, impeding its efforts to become agile.
Read more: 18 Signs of a Systemic Toxic Team Culture.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
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See all upcoming classes here.
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📺 Join 2,350-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel:
- 🆕 Remote Agile (1) Replay: Practices and Tools for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Product Owners.
- Scrum Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns.
- Scrum Master Anti-Patterns.
✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn about Serendipity-Driven Innovation: Join the 8,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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