TL; DR: Disruptive Innovation — Food for Agile Thought #471
Welcome to the 471st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,887 peers. This week, Steven Sinofsky delves into the resilience and boldness required for disruptive innovation, while Robert A. Calkins gleans leadership insights from Star Trek: TNG. Michael Y. Lee tackles the complexities of decentralization, Jason Little and Dawna Jones offer strategies for managing organizational tangles, and Vincent Baas critiques the misuse of popular innovation quotes, advocating for thoughtful, context-aware application.
Next, Christophe Achouiantz reveals how meaningful problems and supportive environments enable true team empowerment, while Mike Fisher underscores the importance of outcomes over outputs for business success. Yue Zhao and Paweł Huryn share Meta’s pre-mortem approach to proactive risk management, and Paul McAvinchey explores retention strategies for sustainable growth and lasting user engagement.
Lastly, Christian Scheb unpacks Elon Musk’s “5 Step Process” for engineering rigor, while Itamar Gilad explores AI’s role in elevating data-driven product decisions. Christina Wodtke champions “decoupled OKRs” to foster team autonomy, and Ant Murphy warns against blind reliance on data. Finally, Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, and Derek Xiao examine generative AI’s 2024 evolution from pilots to enterprise-scale execution.
🎓 January 27, 2025: The Advanced Product Backlog Management Course for Just $99!
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- The course includes membership in my former professional students’ brand-new Hands-on Agile community.
- The course will only be available for sign-up until February 3, 2025!
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Disruptive Innovation
: On the Toll of Being a Disruptor
Steven Sinofsky reflects on the personal and organizational toll of driving disruptive innovation, emphasizing the resilience, criticism, and bold leadership necessary to challenge entrenched systems and create lasting change.
🍋 Lemon of the Week
(via Radical Candor): Radical Candor In Agile Methodologies
The author reinvents the wheel with Radical Candor, presenting basic Agile principles like openness and feedback as groundbreaking innovations. Spoiler: Scrum and Agile already emphasize transparency, respect, and continuous improvement—no rebranding required.
➿ Agile & Leadership
: ‘Get it Done:’ Adjusting to Transitions in Leadership Aboard the USS Enterprise
Robert A. Calkins explores leadership transitions through Star Trek: The Next Generation, emphasizing adaptability, empathy, and aligning leadership styles to team needs for successful command changes.
(via INSEAD Knowledge): How to Dismantle Hierarchies in Teams
Michael Y. Lee explores the challenges of dismantling hierarchies, emphasizing that successful decentralization requires ongoing efforts like bounding and grounding authority to sustain new power dynamics and foster collaboration.
: 📺 How to Un-tangle the Organizational Hairball
Jason Little and Dawna Jones discuss tackling organizational complexity in That Change Show. They offer actionable strategies, systems thinking insights, and real-world examples to help leaders untangle challenges and drive meaningful change.
(via Medium): Death by a thousand management quotes
Vincent Baas critiques misused innovation quotes, urging deeper understanding and proper context. He highlights the balance between data, gut feelings, flexibility, and customer listening and warns against mindlessly following oversimplified, misattributed wisdom.
🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — December 18-19, 2024
Discover Scrum’s four success principles in this official Scrum.org Advanced Scrum Master training class, which includes the industry-recognized PSM II certification. The PSM II training class is designed as a live virtual class and will be in English.
Enjoy the benefits of a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 CET.
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — December 18-19, 2024.
Customer Voice: “Dear Stefan, Thanks a lot for two intense and mindblowing days. Your way of teaching suites me perfectly. I must admit that all the positive feedback you have gotten is spot on! I would any time a day recommand your class to a Scrum Master who wants to add a whole new level to his/her scrum game. To all of you reading this. You have to experience Stefans class to understand how good it is.” (Source.)
🎯 Product
(via Crisp): Why your teams aren’t really empowered (and how to fix It)
Christophe Achouiantz explores why many “empowered” teams are actually stuck implementing pre-defined solutions and shares how giving teams meaningful problems and the right environment unlocks true empowerment.
: Output vs. Outcomes
Mike Fisher highlights the critical distinction between outputs and outcomes, urging businesses to prioritize delivering meaningful impact over simply producing more, with actionable strategies to foster outcome-driven success.
: How Meta and Instagram Use Pre-Mortems to Avoid Post-Mortems
Yue Zhao and Paweł Huryn highlight how Meta and Instagram use pre-mortems to identify potential project risks, fostering open dialogue, collaboration, and proactive problem-solving to enhance product launch success.
(via Mind The Product): Deep Dive: Creating Effective Retention Strategies
Paul McAvinchey emphasizes the critical role of customer retention in sustainable growth, offering data-driven strategies, psychological insights, and product-led tactics to create lasting value and boost long-term user engagement.
📯 The Inverted MoSCoW Framework: Stop Building What You Do Not Need
The inverted MoSCoW framework reverses traditional prioritization, focusing on what a product team won’t build rather than what it will. Deliberately excluding features helps teams streamline development, avoid scope creep, and maximize focus on what truly matters.
While it aligns with Agile principles of simplicity and efficiency, it also requires careful implementation to avoid rigidity, misalignment, or stifling innovation. Used thoughtfully, it’s a powerful tool for managing product scope and driving strategic clarity.
Read on and learn how to make the inverted MoSCoW framework work for your team.
Learn more: The Inverted MoSCoW Framework: Stop Building What You Do Not Need.
📅 Hands-on Agile 2025 Is Here — Join 500-plus Peers: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility
I am thrilled to announce that Hands-on Agile 2025 is officially on the horizon and will be free to attend from February 4-6, 2025. This time, we will focus on how Agile needs to evolve from concept-based agility to context-based agility.
But before we discuss what that means, let’s take a step back and consider why Hands-on Agile 2025 is going to be a can’t-miss event for everyone in the agile community.
For those unfamiliar, Hands-on Agile isn’t just another conference. It’s an event built around the Barcamp model, meaning it’s a self-organized, community-driven gathering with one goal: Sharing knowledge and experiences.
From February 4 to 6, 2025, we will spend three energizing days engaging in sessions, practicing agile games, sharing war stories, and learning directly from each other. Hands-on Agile is all about creating a space for practitioners, coaches, leaders, and newcomers to connect in a truly hands-on way.
Save Your Seat Now!
There are no tickets; Hands-on Agile 2025 is free.
However, you will need to register nevertheless. Otherwise, you would not receive, for example, the invitation to the HoA2025 community or have access to individual session access credentials:
Please note:
- For technical reasons, your sign-up confirmation will be sent from stefan [at] age-of-product.com.
- Your registration to Hands-on Agile 2025 will also subscribe you to Stefan’s Food for Agile newsletter, one of the largest independent newsletters on agile practices worldwide.
- Your invitation to join the Hands-on Agile 2025 community will be limited to February 28, 2025.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
: Elon Musk’s Engineering Principles – The 5-Step Process
Elon Musk’s “5 Step Process” highlights iterative engineering: question requirements, eliminate unnecessary parts, avoid optimizing non-essentials, prioritize cycle time, and automate last. Musk emphasizes manufacturing over design as the actual challenge.
: 4 Levels of Data Proficiency
Itamar Gilad delves into the evolution of data proficiency, emphasizing deliberate data use, evidence-guided practices, and AI's potential to drive more competent, more impactful product decisions.
: Decoupling OKRs: It’s Time to Let Go
Christina Wodtke critiques traditional OKR alignment processes, advocating for “decoupled OKRs” where leadership sets a clear direction, teams define their own goals, and trust replaces bureaucratic approvals.
: Data-Informed, NOT Data-Driven
Ant Murphy argues for being data-informed over data-driven, emphasizing critical thinking, bias awareness, and multiple perspectives to enhance decision-making quality and avoid blind reliance on data.
🎶 Encore
(via Menlo Ventures): 2024: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise
Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, and Derek Xiao highlight generative AI’s 2024 leap from experimentation to execution, emphasizing its transformative potential, evolving use cases, and critical challenges enterprises face in implementation.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning, for example, about PM Tools:
- Hands-on Agile 64: Mastering Work Intake: The Key to Sustainability and Flow with Jeremy Willets and Tom Cagley.
- Hands-on Agile 62: From Backlog Manager to Product Manager with David Pereira.
- Hands-on Agile 61: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz.
- Hands-on Agile 59: Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman.
- Hands-on Agile 57: Humble Planning with Maarten Dalmijn.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn About Disruptive Innovation — Join the 20,000-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.
If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
Help your team to learn about Disruptive Innovation by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
