TL; DR: State of Agile 2024 — Food for Agile Thought #436
Welcome to the 436th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,352 peers. This week, we dive into pivotal insights on Agile’s current landscape and organizational impacts. The State of Agile 2024 Report, as discussed by Joyce Tompsett and Shane Hastie, uncovers the evolving challenges and adaptations within Agile practices, highlighting a trend towards hybrid methodologies and the crucial alignment of Agile with business outcomes. Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson’s conversation with Ron Westrum sheds light on organizational culture, using insights from NASA and Boeing. Ben Hartshorne shares Honeycomb’s journey, illustrating the strategic incorporation of technical debt resolution to foster business growth. Lastly, Ben Werdmuller reflects on the evolution of web development, emphasizing the importance of purpose, teamwork, and a culture promoting innovation and inclusivity.
Then, Marty Cagan and Richard Russell delve into Amazon’s customer-focused approach through Prime, showcasing how to fuel technological advancements and long-term value. Leah Tharin discusses the realities versus the idealistic expectations in product management. At the same time, Geoff Watts addresses the challenge of people-pleasing in leadership, presenting techniques for maintaining project integrity while fostering positive relationships. Lastly, Petra Wille emphasizes the critical role of saying “no” in product management, proposing strategies to prioritize and encourage innovation within resource constraints.
Lastly, Andy Walker critiques traditional productivity metrics, advocating for a focus on team dynamics and best practices to enhance development. Willem-Jan Ageling explores the benefits and strategies of dynamic reteaming in product development, and Corinna Baldauf shares insights on using Open Space sessions for effective company-wide retrospectives. Also, we explore how Scrum teams can lose stakeholder support. Finally, David Luan discusses leading Adept in developing practical AGI, reflecting on missed opportunities with GPT-3 at Google.
🎓 May 30, 2024: Learn to Master Your Most Important Artifact w/ the Advanced Product Backlog Management Course for Just $149!
The most popular discussion on LinkedIn last week was: What data do you use to show you are successful as a Coach or Scrum Master?
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: State of Agile 2024
(via Digital.ai): 📖 17th State of Agile Report
The 17th State of Agile Report reveals a critical moment for Agile, facing challenges adapting to current shifts like AI, developer burnout, and hybrid work environments. While small organizations praise Agile’s benefits, larger companies express dissatisfaction, leaning towards hybrid frameworks combining Agile with other methods. Leadership in Agile transformation primarily comes from business leaders and executives, with many organizations adopting a mixed approach to software development strategies.
🍋 Lemon of the Week
We are lemon-free this week.
➿ Agile & Scrum
and : 🎙 Innovation and disaster with Ron Westrum
Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson discuss how organizational culture impacts innovation and disasters with Ron Westrum. They explore generative, bureaucratic, and pathological cultures, using NASA and Boeing as examples, emphasizing leadership integrity and the role of technical maestros in fostering an environment where information flows freely, and innovation thrives.
(via InfoQ): How to Get Tech-Debt on the Roadmap
Ben Hartshorne advocates aligning technical debt resolution with business goals to prioritize it on roadmaps, using Honeycomb’s growth and scaling challenges as examples to enhance business efficiency and growth.
and (via InfoQ): The State of Agile in 2024
Joyce Tompsett and Shane Hastie discuss the 17th State of Agile report, which highlights the disconnect between Agile practitioners and business perspectives, the trend towards hybrid methodologies, the emphasis on business outcomes, and the broad adoption of Agile practices across various organizational domains.
: Building engineering
Ben Werdmuller reflects on over two decades in web development, emphasizing the shift from ‘what’ and ‘how’ to build to focus on organizational purpose, teamwork, and navigating technology trends. They advocate for a culture of innovation, inclusion, and servant leadership to empower teams for creative problem-solving.
🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — April 23-24, 2024
Discover Scrum’s four success principles in this official Scrum.org class for Advanced Scrum Masters, including the industry-acknowledged PSM II certification. This PSFS training class is in English.
Enjoy the benefits of a live-virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 o’clock CET.
Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — April 23-24, 2024.
Customer Voice: “Since about 12 people have already asked me these last 2 days: Yes, taking one of Stefan Wolpers’ classes is a mind-blowing experience. He’s actually the most adroit facilitator I’ve met after Guy Kawasaki & Roland Busch. It all flows like a silk ribbon in a soft spring breeze but with a strong authenticity that prevents the thing from feeling all Del Monte Canned Corporate Facilitation(tm). It may be due to his seemingly effortless mastery of the Liberating Structures. He doesn’t “teach to the test,” yet when you take the open practice assessments, you somehow score 95+ the first time. I dunno, it’s magic or Mozart, you pick.” (Source.)
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🎯 Product
and (via Silicon Valley Product Group): The Product Model at Amazon
Marty Cagan and Richard Russell detail Amazon’s approach with Prime, highlighting a focus on customer-centric innovation and agile development. They illustrate how strategic experimentation and strong leadership drive Amazon’s ability to harness technology for improved service, showcasing Prime as a testament to its commitment to long-term value and impactful outcomes.
: Why Product Managers hate their jobs…
Leah Tharin highlights the gap between the idealistic expectations for product management and the realities faced by product managers, emphasizing the need for empathy, empowerment, and addressing organizational challenges to align aspirations with practical outcomes.
: The People Pleasing Product Leader
Geoff Watts explores Jordan’s struggle with people-pleasing, risking project integrity. It advocates for balanced “people-pleasing” with strategies like boundary setting, value clarification, assertiveness, and self-care to ensure leadership effectiveness.
: The Art of Saying No, Product Leadership Edition
Petra Wille underscores the importance of saying “no” in product management, offering strategies for balancing resources and aligning with strategy. She advocates for nuanced responses, using data and focusing on customer-centric decisions to navigate constraints and encourage innovation.
📯 How Scrum Teams Fail Stakeholders and What You Can Do About It
In this article, we uncover typical ways in which Scrum teams fail stakeholders, from overpromising results to poor risk communication to neglecting feedback. Moreover, we will also explore actionable strategies to overcome these anti-patterns by building trust, aligning priorities, and enhancing collaboration for successful product development.
Read more: How Scrum Teams Fail Stakeholders and What You Can Do About It.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
(via Better Programming): No, you shouldn’t measure software engineers — but you should help them adopt best practices
Andy Walker argues against measuring software engineer productivity through metrics alone, advocating instead for fostering team dynamics, educating on best practices like DORA and SPACE, and empowering teams to share progress and context, thus enhancing overall software development effectiveness.
(via LogRocket): An introduction to dynamic reteaming
Willem-Jan Ageling, inspired by Heidi Helfand, highlights the inevitability and benefits of dynamic reteaming in product development. He discusses strategies for managing team changes and embracing team evolution as an opportunity.
: Organization-wide retrospectives? Open Space!
Corinna Baldauf reflects on discovering that Open Space sessions functioned as effective company-wide Retrospectives without the traditional structure. This format encouraged diverse participation and problem-solving, providing a platform for addressing issues beyond the scope of team-level Retrospectives.
🎶 Encore
(via Latent Space Podcast): Why Google failed to make GPT-3 + why Multimodal Agents are the path to AGI — with David Luan of Adept
David Luan, ex-OpenAI and Google, now leads Adept in advancing AGI with multimodal agents that perform diverse computer tasks, emphasizing enterprise applications and high reliability. He explores Google’s missed opportunity with GPT-3 and Adept’s strategic focus on practical AGI development.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
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See all upcoming classes here.
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📺 Join 5,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning, for example, about the State of Agile 2024:
- Hands-on Agile 59: Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman.
- Hands-on Agile 58: Dysfunction Mapping with Michael Lloyd.
- Hands-on Agile 57: Humble Planning with Maarten Dalmijn.
- Hands-on Agile 54: Overcoming Common Product Backlog Management Traps with David Pereira.
- Hands-on Agile 53: An Agile Coaches Guide to Storytelling with Bob Galen.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
- Hands-on Agile 43: Outcome-Based Product Planning with Jeff Gothelf.
- Hands-on Agile 42: Lean Roadmapping and OKRs with Janna Bastow.
- Hands-on Agile 38: The Product Owner with Roman Pichler.
✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn About the State of Agile 2024 — Join the 19,000-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.
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Help your team to learn about the State of Agile 2024 by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
