Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 29th, 2017—shared with 6,369 peers—uncovers the Zombie Scrum apocalypse, and other anti-patterns of organizations stuck in their transformation process.
We advocate self-organization by asking questions and thus resisting the urge to ‘fix’ an urgent problem. Also, we revisit the ‘done’-question with Wally: bugs or no bugs?
David Cancel claims: Agile is dead, long live customer-centricity! And he provides a free ebook to prove his point. Speaking of customer-centricity: feature flags can come quite handy to achieve this objective. Learn how to apply them. And while you’re at it, build more trust with your stakeholders, and assess yourself as a Product Owner.
Last but not least: We follow Uber and Airbnb on their way to disrupt the taxi and hotel industry — in less than a decade. (Schumpeter would have been fascinated.)
[bctt tweet="Food For Thought #76: Zombie Scrum, Agile Is Dead, Build Trust, Feature Flags, PO Assessment"]Agile & Zombie Scrum
: Zombie Scrum - Symptoms, Causes and Treatment
Knowing what causes Zombie Scrum might help prevent a further outbreak of this terrible evolution, believes Barry Overeem.
: Change, or Else!
Len Lagestee kicks off a new series of posts looking at the journey of organizational change — from the “old world” to the “new world.”
: Stop giving answers... ask powerful questions instead to empower your team
Andy Cleff explains why it is important resisting the urge to provide a solution and instead ask a question so that the team has to think through and solve emergent problems themselves.
: Feature Mapping - a simpler path from stories to executable acceptance criteria
John Ferguson Smart shares how to use feature maps to create good acceptance criteria, or better “executable specifications”, as BDD refers to them.
: Tricky To Be An Optimist
Wally and the pointy-haired boss discuss: Can ‘done’ software include some bugs?
Product & Lean
(via Driftt): Hypergrowth
The age of Waterfall and Agile is over, claims David Cancel of Drift. Why? Because those methodologies leave out the most crucial resource a company has: customers. The key is being customer-driven. Download the free ebook.
(via Mind The Product): 10 Ways to Use Feature Flags
Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder at Launch Darkly, explains why feature flags are beneficial to Product Managers and shows you how to use them to manage risk, keep different groups of users happy, and make your job less stressful.
(via Medium): Good things happen when a Product Manager pairs with a UX researcher
Alëna Iouguina – UX Research Lead at Shopify – talks about strategies that can help improve the product development lifecycle.
: Five Ways a Product Owner Can Build Trust
Ellen Gottesdiener notes that low trust levels can result in project churn, team turnover, low morale, and unhappy customers and shares five ways to build trust with stakeholders.
: Product Owner Assessment
Do you know how you are doing as a Product Owner? Which areas do you excel at? And which areas should you be spending more time learning about? Assess yourself, courtesy of Sam Laing.
The Essential Read
(via Bloomberg): The $99 Billion Idea: How Uber and Airbnb Won
How User and Airbnb fought City Hall, won over the people, outlasted rivals, and figured out the sharing economy.