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Food for Agile Thought #163: Building Agile Teams, Curiosity and Discovery, Squandering Brilliant Ideas

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #163—shared with 19,504 peers—focuses on building agile teams. We learn that a group of folks being in the same place at the same time does not constitute a team, that throwing money at the challenge cannot buy success. It seems, though, that successful team coaching is a long and windy road.

We also come back to another favorite topic—how to avoid building the wrong product—and understand that continuous product discovery based on hypotheses and experiments is essential for product success.

Lastly, we secretly enjoy some schadenfreude when diving into the reasons why big organizations squander brilliant ideas.

Have a great week!



🏆 The Essential Read

Viktor Cessan and Stefan Lindbohm: The First Question To Ask When Building Teams - Is This Really A Team?

Viktor Cessan and Stefan Lindbohm analyze why so many organizations fail at building agile teams despite investing so much.

Building Agile Teams & Scrum

(via Zalando Technology): A Team for Teams

Katrin Elise Dreyer looks back at Zalando’s learnings from coaching dozens of agile teams.

Michael Balle (via Lean Enterprise Inst): Is agile project management simply lean thinking applied to software development?

Michael Ballé dissects the situation of ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ as envisioned by the creators versus what is practiced in today’s organizations.

Jimmy Janlén and Joshua Kerievsky (via Crisp): ‘Are you curious?’ Seminar with Joshua Kerievsky, creator of Modern Agile

Joshua Kerievsky asks: ‘Are you continuously curious about your customers and their needs?’ He does not believe that this task should be left to a single team member.

📅 Hands-om Agile Webinar #8: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns — October 16, 2018

The eighth Hands-on Agile webinar on Scrum Master Anti-Patterns addresses twelve anti-patterns of your Scrum Master—from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Download your invitation: Hands-on Agile Webinar #8: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns — October 16, 2018.

Product & Lean

Teresa Torres (via Product Talk): The Best Continuous Discovery Teams Cultivate These Mindsetss

Teresa Torres shares her slide deck from the Industry Product Conference about the three mindsets that help a team find success as a continuous discovery team.

(via Optimizely Blog): How to Avoid Building the Wrong Product? Make Your Product Roadmap Your Experimentation Roadmap

Whelan Boyd stresses the importance of having a hypotheses backlog to drive experimentation.

Tim Harford: Why big companies squander brilliant ideas

In an entertaining article, the underground economist Tim Harford covers a spectrum of epic failures from Xerox to Nokia to Sony and the reasons behind it.

📺 Join 800-plus Agile Peers on Youtube

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✋ Do Not Miss Out: Join the 4,025-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 now 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.

🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #162: Organizational Agility, Enterprise Slowness, Product Strategy, State of DevOps Report 2018..

Categories: News
Stefan Wolpers: Stefan, based near Hamburg, Germany, has worked for 18-plus years as a Product Manager, Product Owner, Agile Coach, and Scrum Master. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org and the author of Pearson’s “Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide.” He has developed B2C as well as B2B software, for startups as well as corporations, including a former Google subsidiary. Stefan curates the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and organizes the Hands-on Agile Conference, a Barcamp for agile practitioners.
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