TL; DR: Product Operating Model Template — Food for Agile Thought #440
Welcome to the 440th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,461 peers. This week, Andy Birds shares a product operating model template to enhance ROI and customer outcomes. Brendan Gregg critiques the impact of disruptive “brilliant jerks” in engineering, while John Cutler advocates for engagement over layoffs. Also, Alex Debecker shares Basecamp’s Shape Up methodology, and Murray Robinson discusses the commodification of methodologies.
Then, Itamar Gilad warns about the potential pitfalls of Generative AI in degrading product culture. Roger Martin critiques traditional strategic planning, emphasizing genuine strategic thinking. Moreover, Ant Murphy introduces innovative Product Backlog formats and management techniques, and Teresa Torres and Stephanie Leue discuss transitioning from a feature factory to continuous discovery.
Lastly, Dave Rooney suggests replacing Story Points with simpler metrics, such as counting completed user stories. Nočnica Mellifera warns against misusing DORA metrics as high-stakes personnel tools. Abi Noda and Tim Cochran also promote qualitative metrics for measuring developer productivity. Cameron Presley advocates for blameless postmortems to learn from failures. Finally, Benedict Evans discusses evolving AI use cases, considering its potential to manage complex tasks.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Product Operating Model Template
(via ThoughtWorks): How to create a product operating model to support product organization transformation
Andy Birds discusses transforming enterprises into product organizations by adopting a product operating model (POM) that prioritizes data-informed decisions, accelerates delivery, and enhances investment ROI by focusing on customer outcomes.
🍋 Lemon of the Week
We are Lemon-free this week.
➿ Agile & Scrum
: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
Brendan Gregg discusses the detrimental impact of “brilliant jerks” in engineering, distinguishing between selfless and selfish types and advocating for company policies that do not tolerate such disruptive behaviors.
: Why Aren't We Talking About Continuous Improvement?
John Cutler reflects on his crisis with continuous improvement in tech, questioning the role of layoffs versus engagement in company transformations and advocating for a return to core principles like Kaizen.
(via Mind The Product): 7 lessons from trialling Basecamp's 'Shape Up' methodology
Alex Debecker shares insights from implementing Basecamp’s Shape Up methodology, highlighting its departure from traditional development, which does not involve Sprints or tasks and focuses on unified problem-solving.
: The Way is Dead. Long live the Way!
Referring to an article by John Cutler, Murray Robinson explores the lifecycle of methodologies using Simon Wardley’s concept of commodification, illustrating the evolution from innovative practices to standardized methods across fields like Data, Business Agility, and DevOps.
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🎯 Product
: What Does Generative AI Mean For Product Development?
Itamar Gilad examines the transformative impact and potential risks of Generative AI in product development, cautioning against its ability to degrade product culture and generate low-quality products quickly.
(via YouTube): 📺 A Plan Is Not a Strategy
Roger Martin argues that actual strategy involves stepping out of comfort zones, contrasting with common strategic planning, which often lacks genuine strategic thinking.
(via YouTube): 📺 8 Different Ways to Organize your Product Backlog
Ant Murphy explores eight Product Backlog formats and advanced management techniques to enhance focus and improve outcomes, offering solutions for those overwhelmed by traditional tools like Jira.
: 📺 Shifting from a Feature Factory to Continuous Discovery
Teresa Torres talks to Stephanie Leue, providing insights into shifting from a feature factory to a continuous discovery approach.
📈 Scrum Master Tasks: Let’s Bust Some Myths!
Rumor says that a great Scrum Master supports one team at a time. If that is true, how do you spend your time with the team members, helping them become self-managing? Moreover, what about stakeholders and the organization? Let’s gather some data on Scrum Master tasks anonymously and answer the question!
Please join the 2024 survey on Scrum Master tasks here.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
: Ultimately, There's No Point!
Dave Rooney advocates for discarding Story Points in agile processes, emphasizing more straightforward metrics like counting completed user stories to boost productivity and value delivery.
(via The New Stack): The Wrong Way to Use DORA Metrics
Nočnica Mellifera examines the misuse of DORA metrics, meant to enhance developer enablement but often misinterpreted as high-stakes metrics for staffing decisions, highlighting the need for mindful application beyond mere numbers.
: Measuring Developer Productivity via Humans
Abi Noda and Tim Cochran emphasize qualitative metrics in measuring developer productivity. They argue that data from developers themselves offers a richer, more accurate measure of productivity than traditional system-based metrics. Their approach aims to understand productivity from the developers’ perspective, advocating for a human-centered metric system in organizational assessments.
: Learning From Failures: Leveraging Postmortems for Good
Cameron Presley emphasizes learning from failures, advocating for postmortems that analyze outages without blaming to prevent recurring issues and continually improve systems.
🎶 Encore
: Looking for AI use-cases
Benedict Evans discusses the evolving use cases for AI like ChatGPT, noting its capabilities and limitations and speculating on its potential to handle complex, multi-step tasks without specialized software for each.
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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 Product Operating Model Template:
- Hands-on Agile 59: Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman.
- 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.
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