Age of Product’s Food for Thought of October 9th, 2016—shared with 4,932 peers—requires you to be strong: you will face the worst example of Scrum anti-patterns in years. Speaking of dark times, Ron Jeffries also reminds us why developers sometimes feel unsafe in agile environments.
We then have to let go of the idea that the route to scaling agile means adopting the “Spotify model”. Spoiler alert: you have to figure that out on your own. We provide you with 10 principles for the transition, though, as well as a great video with Alex Osterwalder from our friends at Podojo.
We then dive deep into how to find the 10 X product worth building, for example, using Drift’s “Burndown Framework”. If you now have doubts about whether your product delivery organization is up to the task, check John Cutler’s list of 30 issues when considering its health status. You didn’t attend “Mind the Product 2016”? Don’t worry, we have the executive summary for you.
Last but not least, we learn how Didi defeated Uber in China, and ask: Are Facebook, Twitter & co. aging utilities, powering an outdated version of the social internet?
Enjoy a great Sunday!
[bctt tweet=”Food For Thought #62: Scrum Anti Patterns, Spotify Scaling Fallacy, 10 X Products, #mtpcon 2016″]Scrum Anti Patterns & Agile
(via Scrum Alliance): The Agile Scorecard
Pawan Suresh Mude “contributes” the worst anti pattern, the worst embodiment of “dark Scrum”, I have seen in years. And it was published on the Scrum Alliance community blog. Have a seat before reading it.
: Time was ...
Ron Jeffries shares his thought why Scrum becomes Dark Scrum, and the world becomes unsafe for developers.
: 10 Principles To Transform
Barry O'Reilly stresses that to become a high performance organization you need to continually adapt, adjust and innovate, and that there is a set of 10 principles that help businesses to transform into such kind of organization.
(via InfoQ): There Is No Spotify Model
Ben Linders advises not to copy the Spotify model when trying to scale agile practices in your organization, as everything is always in flux—even at Spotify. It took them several years of experimentation to figure out what nowadays is working for them.
(via Podojo): Culture and Leadership in Innovation Programs
Alex Osterwalder, founder and CEO of Strategyzer, creator of the business model and the value proposition canvases, shares his learning on nurturing innovation programs.
(via Harvard Business Review): Like It or Not, You Are Always Leading by Example
Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, reminds us that growing effective leaders is challenging work, as competence, character, creativity, and charisma remain difficult qualities to quantify, let alone cultivate.
Product & Lean
(via Medium): Needfinding for Disruptive Innovation
Christina Wodtke describes the process how to not just innovate a product, but come up with something so radically different (and better), that users are willing to take on the pain and annoyance of changing products.
(via Crisp): Value: The Lynchpin in Agile Product Management
Ellen Gottesdiener summarizes the outcome of her session at the “Agile Product Open” on the topic “Value: The Whats, Whys, and Hows” in the marketplace of ideas.
(via Seeking Wisdom): How to Use the Burndown Framework to Build Better Products
Matt Bilotti details in a step-by-step guide how you can use Drift’s Burndown Framework for your own product delivery organization to become radically customer-centric.
(via Medium): 30 Things I Think about When Meeting a Product Dev Org for the First Time
John Cutler shares an epic list of topics, he is taking into consideration when he is doing a health-check of a product delivery organization. A great way to start thinking about an agile transition.
: Ants and Aliens: Why you need a thirty-year plan (yes, thirty)
Ken Norton makes a compelling pitch to imagine your product in thirty years, if you want to prepare for the (near) future.
“There is no point in having a 5-year plan in this industry. With each step forward, the landscape you’re walking on changes. So we have a pretty good idea of where we want to be in six months, and where we want to be in thirty years. And every six months we take another look at where we want to be in thirty years to plan out the next six months.” (Facebook’s Little Red Book)
(via Mind The Product): What we Learned at Mind the Product 2016
Martin Eriksson summarizes the most important learnings from the ‘2016 Mind the Product’ conference.
Essential Reads
(via Bloomberg): Uber Has Always Looked Unstoppable. Then It Went to China
Bloomberg provides an in depth portrait of Cheng Wei, founder and chief executive officer of Didi, detailing how Didi managed to beat Uber in China.
“We felt like the People’s Liberation Army, with basic rifles, and we were bombed by airplanes and missiles.”
(via Medium): The Hive is the New Network
Arjun Sethi argues that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may have started as revolutionary networks, but nowadays they are aging utilities, powering an outdated version of the social internet.