TL; DR: Evolutionary Design, Product-Market-Fit — Food for Agile Thought #256
Welcome to the 256th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,912 peers. This week, we talk about the advantages of evolutionary design; we delve into predictability, and we promise to improve on estimating.
We then explore where news ideas originate, pointing at the apparent anti-patterns simultaneously; we talk money in product management, and we come back to outcome-driven business impacts.
Lastly, we applaud Jerome Kehrli for an epic guide on how to achieve product-market-fit.
TL; DR: Serendipity-Driven Innovation, Biases at Work — Food for Agile Thought #255
Welcome to the 255th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,874 peers. This week, we embrace serendipity-driven innovation; we analyze the secret work of cognitive biases, and we delve deeper into Amazon’s “disagree but commit” principle.
We then figure out how to lift the collaboration between product and engineering to the next level; we enjoy product leadership lessons from the UK’s Ministry of Justice digital team, and we promise to replace old-fashioned product requirement documents.
Lastly, we consider creating a user manual for ourselves to improve communication with our teammates.
What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. While they try to become more appealing to product and software developers, they still have difficulties understanding what it takes to build an attractive product/engineering culture. Learn more about typical anti-patterns and signs that an organization is causing a toxic team culture, impeding its efforts to become agile.
TL; DR: Virtual 25/10 Crowdsourcing, Innovation Theater — Food for Agile Thought #254
Welcome to the 254th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,836 peers. This week, we applaud David for creating a free virtual 25/10 Crowdsourcing app; we learn what happened to a thriving agile culture once the company laid off the agile folks. Also, we accept the necessity to avoid delays in the management decision process if our agile transition shall bear fruit.
We then lift the confusion over vision and mission and the question who is responsible for which; we delve into a favorite corporate pastime and browse a well-curated repository of templates for product people for new shiny things to support our journey to build great products.
Lastly, we listen in to a conversation on Wardley maps with — Simon Wardley.
TL; DR: Lipstick Agile — Happiness in the Trenches?
Have you noticed how many people in the agile field are unhappy with their work situation? A situation where an organization already struggles doing agile, not to mention ‘becoming agile?’ This is what I call lipstick Agile.
Scrum Masters and agile coaches are close to either burnout or indifference. Product Owners who “own” the product by name only, and developers questioning why “Agile” is imposed upon them and often turns out to be just another form of micromanagement.
TL; DR: Successful Change, Product Centricity Lessons — Food for Agile Thought #253
Welcome to the 253rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 26,802 peers. This week, we delve into successful change; we explore self-organization at scale, and we revisit the mantra of the two-pizza teams.
We then listen to the story of a product leader who has to move beyond ‘Agile’ & metrics; we pick up insights from a success story on transitioning to a product-driven organization, and we come back to the adage that ideas are worth nothing, only execution is.
Lastly, we consider whether regarding transitions as products would increase the chances of a successful change.
