TL; DR: Dunbar’s Number — Food for Agile Thought #437
Welcome to the 437th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,378 peers. This week, Patrick O’Shaughnessy interviews Robin Dunbar on Dunbar’s Number, revealing insights into human connections and their relevance in organizational structures. Jim Doran links Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle with Agile, highlighting the balance between focus and speed, alongside the importance of collaboration between Product Managers and Technical Leads. Eric Barker offers strategies to enhance team performance, including keeping teams small and fostering mutual respect. Jutta Eckstein, Susan McIntosh, Craig Smith, Ben Linders, Rafiq Gemmail, and Shane Hastie discuss the latest tech industry trends, focusing on remote innovation, AI, inclusivity, and sustainability. Also, Derk-Jan de Grood tackles five dependencies that slow down agile teams and provides solutions to improve efficiency and delivery.
Then, Debbie Levitt criticizes feature-first mindsets, urging a shift to user-centered product development. Teresa Torres highlights the effectiveness of story-based interviews in grasping actual user needs, and Marcus Castenfors discusses overcoming “Discovery Illness” by refining product discovery processes. Moreover, Ant Murphy shares strategies for streamlining product backlogs to focus on impactful outcomes. Lastly, Ash Maurya advocates for a problem-discovery approach, emphasizing the value of genuine user insights in shaping solutions.
Lastly, Jim Morris critiques the integration of OKRs with conventional processes, advocating for an analytics-first mindset. Avi Siegel distinguishes between job stories and user stories, underlining their collective importance. Another piece dissects common mistakes in user journey mapping, advocating for SMART goals and ongoing updates. Finally, we delve into the evolution of prototyping, from basic sketches to advanced simulations, highlighting their role in refining design and development stages.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Dunbar’s Number & Team Building
(via Colossus): 🎙 Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection
In this interview, Patrick O’Shaughnessy explores Robin Dunbar’s research journey to discovering Dunbar’s Number, illustrating its profound impact on understanding human connections, social circle layering, and its implications for organizational structures and personal well-being. Dunbar shares insights into homophily’s role in forming friendships and addresses modern challenges like technology’s impact on social interaction and the rising trend of loneliness.
🍋 Lemon of the Week
We are lemon-free this week.
➿ Agile & Scrum
(via Medium): How Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Relates to Building Software
Jim Doran connects Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to Agile software development, emphasizing the balance between project focus and development speed and the critical synergy between Product Managers and Technical Leads.
: 4 Secrets Of High-Performing Teams
To enhance team performance, Eric Barker advises questioning team necessity, keeping teams small, selecting the right members, ensuring mutual respect, including a constructive critic, and practicing supportive leadership emphasizing impact and progress.
(via InfoQ): 🎙 InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends in 2024
Jutta Eckstein, Susan McIntosh, Craig Smith, Ben Linders, Rafiq Gemmail, and Shane Hastie discuss 2024’s tech industry trends. They emphasize innovation in remote work, AI’s support role, inclusivity, the need for sustainability in development, and practices for reducing carbon footprint and e-waste in software projects.
(via AgileConnection): 5 Types of Dependencies Slowing You Down (and How to Fix Them)
Derk-Jan de Grood discusses five dependencies—chain, stack, shared people, resources, and codebase—slowing agile teams. He suggests strategies like defining roles, enhancing collaboration, and adopting CI/CD to mitigate their effects and improve delivery.
🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — April 23-24, 2024
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🎯 Product
(via Medium): Shift From ‘Product First’ to ‘Product Last’
Debbie Levitt critiques the pitfalls of prioritizing product features over genuine user needs. She advocates for a “product last” process that starts with understanding user tasks, experiences, and pain points and ends with creating valuable, user-focused products.
: Story-Based Customer Interviews Uncover Much-Needed Context
Teresa Torres advocates for story-based customer interviews, emphasizing their role in uncovering genuine user needs and behaviors over hypothetical scenarios that might lead in the wrong direction.
(via Crisp): The Discovery Illness
Marcus Castenfors identifies “Discovery Illness” in product discovery and suggests solutions like focused collaboration, stakeholder management, and scope limitation to avoid inertia and enhance solution development efficiency.
: Long Backlogs and Unmeasurable Work
Ant Murphy advises shortening product backlogs by focusing on measurable outcomes, having a clear strategy, and breaking down larger goals to align with strategic objectives for efficient prioritization.
: Problems can’t be validated, only discovered
Ash Maurya argues for discovering rather than validating problems, focusing on actions over words, and understanding root causes through unscripted interviews and offers before building solutions.
📺 “Agile” Does Not Work for You? Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman at the 59th Hands-on Agile Meetup
Your team is supposed to use an agile approach, such as Scrum. But you have a years-long backlog, your standups are individual status reports, and you’re still multitasking. You and your team members wish you had the chance to do great work, but this feels a lot like an “agile” death march. There’s a reason you feel that way. You’re using fake agility—a waterfall lifecycle masquerading as an agile approach. Worse, fake agility is the norm in our industry.
Now, there is light at the end of the tunnel; let's delve into Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman!
📺 Watch the video now: “Agile” Does Not Work for You? Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman at the 59th Hands-on Agile Meetup.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
: Our Half-Baked Adoption of OKRs
Jim Morris highlights the pitfalls of poorly integrating OKRs with traditional processes. He emphasizes the importance of an analytics-first culture and the active involvement of teams in data analysis to truly achieve business objectives. He proposes practical steps to effectively navigate the complexities of implementing OKRs.
(via Entrepreneur's Handbook): Job Stories vs. User Stories: The Misguided Debate
Avi Siegel argues job stories uncover user needs while user stories define solution actions, suggesting both are essential at different product development stages to meet user needs.
(via UX Planet): Top 10 Mistakes When Creating User Journey Maps
The author outlines ten critical errors in user journey mapping, from neglecting clear goals and user research to failing to update maps over time. They emphasize setting SMART objectives, incorporating thorough research, understanding emotional journeys, and regularly revisiting journey maps to reflect evolving user behaviors and market trends.
🎶 Encore
(via UXPin): Examples of Prototypes – From Low-Fidelity to High-Fidelity Prototypes
The author guides through the evolution of prototyping, from simple sketches to sophisticated interactive simulations, showcasing the power of each fidelity level in enhancing design and development processes.
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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 Dunbar’s Number — Join the 19,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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Help your team to learn about Dunbar’s Number by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide: