TL; DR: Scaling Ideas From Experiments, #hackerlaws — Food for Agile Thought #331
Welcome to the 331st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 34,627 peers. This week, we listen to Stephen J. Dubner interviewing the economist John List on the trickiness of scaling ideas from successful experiments to actual products and services, quitting, and his book “The Voltage effect.” We also revisit the idea that transformations towards “becoming agile” primarily fail amid a disregard for the first value of the Agile Manifesto. Moreover, we applaud Dave Kerr for aggregating a comprehensive list of helpful mental models for engineering and product development, from Brooks’s Law to YAGNI to Hanlon’s Razor.
We then suggest the “bait the hook, feed the fish” approach for stakeholder communication by adopting the mindset of a newsletter creator. Next, we provide an epic list of essays, videos, and books on the most critical journey of every new product: product/market fit. Also, we delve into the many hats a product manager is wearing, from road mapping to running experiments to being the user advocate, and we follow Kim Witten, who declares the Net Promoter Score ® “unscientific and meaningless” and suggests alternatives.
Lastly, we suggest abandoning the classic code review being a time-sink and switching to mob programming instead, and we list fifteen common behaviors of teams that successfully utilize data in their daily work, from healthy skepticism to killing features and experiments to grappling with uncertainty.
Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought’s issue #330?
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Scaling Ideas
(via Freakonomics): 🎙 Why Do Most Ideas Fail to Scale?
Stephen J. Dubner interviews the economist John List on the trickiness of scaling successful experiments, quitting, and his book “The Voltage effect.”
➿ Agile & Scrum
(via Harvard Business Review): Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety
Timothy R. Clark believes that transformations towards “become agile” primarily fail amid a disregard for the first value of the Agile Manifesto.
(via GitHub): 📖 Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns that developers will find useful. #hackerlaws
Dave Kerr aggregated a comprehensive list of helpful mental models for engineering and product development, from Brooks’s Law to YAGNI to Hanlon’s Razor.
(via Medium): Don’t do Code Review, try Mob instead
Svaťa Šimara suggests abandoning the classic code review being a time-sink and switching to mob programming instead.
🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Online Training w/ PSM II Certificate — March 29-April 1, 2022
Discover Scrum’s four success principles in this official Scrum.org Advanced Professional Scrum Master training class, leading to and including the industry-recognized PSM II certification. The training is designed as a live virtual class and will be offered in English.
Enjoy the benefits of an immersive class of four sessions with like-minded agile peers in the morning hours from 09:00 – 13:00 o’clock CET.
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Online Training w/ PSM II Certificate — March 29-April 1, 2022.
Customer review: “Very hands-on class with lots of concrete takeaways to help in real world scenarios. Reinforced practices and highlighted things that helped in passing the PSM II exam but that was merely a bonus as the content of the class is so useful – certifications or not. Stefan Wolpers is an excellent trainer with broad practical and theoretical knowledge on the subject and his classes seem to have very good working atmosphere (this was a second class by him that I have taken).” (Link.)
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🎯 Product
(via Department of Product): How to Send Internal Product Updates Stakeholders Will Read
Richard Holmes suggests the “bait the hook, feed the fish” approach for stakeholder communication by adopting the mindset of a newsletter creator.
: Top 50 Resources on Product/Market Fit
Sachin Rekhi curated an epic list of essays, videos, and books on the most critical journey of every new product.
: Product manager skills: Evolution of a PM role and its transformation
Oleg Yakubenkov delves into the many hats a product manager is wearing, from road mapping to running experiments to being the user advocate.
📯 How to Sabotage A Product Owner — 53 Anti-Patterns from the Trenches
One of my favorite exercises from my Professional Scrum Product Owner classes is how to best sabotage a Product Owner as a member of the middle management. The exercise rules are simple: You’re not allowed to use any form of illegal activity. So, outsourcing the task to a bunch of outlaws is out of the question. Instead, you are only allowed to use practices that are culturally acceptable within your organization.
Read on and learn more on how to best sabotage a Product Owner from the exercise results of more than twenty PSPO classes. (I edited the suggestions for better readability.)
Learn more: How to Sabotage A Product Owner — 53 Anti-Patterns from the Trenches.
🛠 Tools & Measuring
(via UX Collective): 10 reasons why NPS is BS (and what you can do about it)
Kim Witten declares the Net Promoter Score “unscientific and meaningless” and suggests alternatives.
(via Amplitude): 15 Behaviors of Healthy, Data-Informed Product Teams
John Cutler lists fifteen common behaviors of teams that successfully utilize data in their daily work, from healthy skepticism to killing features and experiments to grappling with uncertainty.
✂️ Cutting Room Floor
(via History Hit): 🎙 The Ancients: Eureka! Innovation in Ancient Greece
In this podcast, Armand D'Angour ends the myth once and for all that ancient Greeks were uncreative and lacked innovation.
📅 Scrum Training Classes, Workshops, and Events
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📺 Join 3,500-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning:
- 🆕 Agile Camp Berlin 2021: The Power and Pains of Autonomy with Jimmy Janlén.
- 🆕 Hands-on Agile #31: The Zones of Value Framework with Valerio Zanini & Zeina Zeitouni.
- Hands-on Agile #35: Designing Powerful Questions to help you Coach & Create with Daniel Stillman.
- Hands-on Agile #34: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety with Richard Kasperowski.
- Agile Camp Berlin 2021: Adapt How You Lead for Agile Success with Johanna Rothman.
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