Food For Thought #42: Remote Agile Teams, Success with Coaches, Hard Scrum Lessons, Roadmap Hacks

Age of Product’s Food for Thought of May 22nd, 2016 provides 20 helpful questions from new Scrum master to product owner, covers success factors, when working with remote agile teams and agile coaches, features an introduction to team psychology and the “cognitive bias” problem and explains the so important moment of engineers engaging with customers.

We also explore, how agile principles can be applied to creating a business strategy, how to identify the most promising product managers, and why disruption is usually a long, slow, and complex journey.

Last, but least, we learn how to effectively and efficiently communicate a product roadmap to stakeholders, the four flavors of innovation failure, the dark side of blockchain, and why coding might have already peaked.

Essential Reads

Vlad Zamfir (via IEEE Spectrum): Ethereum Developer Explores the Dark Side of Bitcoin-Inspired Technology

Vlad of Ethereum is helping creating a world where any exchange can happen using blockchains. And he's really worried about it.

Jason Tanz (via Wired): Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs

Jason on cognitive psychology, code, and artificial intelligence. And how software engineering is likely to change over the course of the coming years.

Scrum & Remote Agile

Chris Brookins (via Help Scout): Remote Agile Teams: How Our Remote Engineering Team Stays Agile

Chris on remote agile teams, the benefits of proximity in an agile organization in general, and how HelpScout nevertheless manages to keep its remote engineering team agile.

Martin Aziz (via Agile Advice Blog): Succeeding with your Agile Coach

Martin provides a concept on how to integrate an external agile coach into your organization and make the collaboration successful for everybody.

Nigel Hamer (via Architects Anonymous): Armchair Psychology for the Agile Practitioner

Nigel on team psychology, an effect called “confirmation bias”, and how to navigate relationships with different team members in the best way.

Marty Cagan: Developer Powered Innovation

Marty of the Silicon Valley Product Group firmly believes that sheltering developers from the customers is harmful to the whole organization.

Magnus Dahlgren (via Medium): 5 things I’ve learned about Scrum the hard way

Magnus on his educational journey on agile software development, and five truths he found out about Scrum along the way.

Edwin Dando: An agile, adaptive business strategy

Edwin asks, whether agile be used for implementing a business strategy? Agile thrives in under complexity and uncertainty – elements intrinsically inherent in business.

From the Blog: 20 Questions to Ask the Product Owner to Get up to Speed as a New Scrum Master

From Scrum master to product owner, this set of questions addresses the future collaboration between the both and the rest of the team. The questions have been modeled after some basic principles, that high performing teams have in common.

20 Questions from New Scrum Master to Product Owner by Age of Product

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Author:

Product & Lean

Todd Jackson (via First Round Capital): Find, Vet and Close the Best Product Managers

Todd – VP Product of Dropbox – shares his best practices on how to identify the best product managers.

Steven Sinofsky (via Medium): Disruption’s Long, Slow, Complex Journey

Steven of Andreessen Horowitz notes, that disruption is a complex dynamic that is much easier to accurately declare after the fact rather than while it is taking place.

Colin Lernell (via UserVoice): 7 Hacks for Communicating Your Product Roadmap to Stakeholders

Colin shares a detailed list of seven best practices on how product managers can effectively and efficiently communicate their product roadmaps to the organization.

Garin Evans (via Smashing Magazine): Why Great Products Need Great Collaboration

Garin on the need of designers and engineers to work closely together to create the best products possible, and how to achieve this level of collaboration.

Casey Cobb (via Aha! Blog): Don’t Let Your Product Strategy Happen to You

Casey on how to not get lost in the emotional process called product development, but focus on a product strategy of providing value to customers in a strategic way.

Madhavan Ramanujam: Product traps: There are Only Four Flavors of Innovation Failure

Madhavan – Partner at Simon-Kucher & Partners – lists the four prevailing product traps that prevent an innovation from flourishing.

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