Food for Agile Thought’s issue #212—shared with 23,794 peers—delves into coach assessment options; we learn how to help teams out of being stuck in discussions, and we gain more insight into the challenges of moving from directive to supportive leadership.
We also embrace the qualities that impact mapping brings to product discovery; we appreciate a new approach to making product decisions, and we will stop ignoring our competition.
Lastly, we are grateful that someone asked the obvious question: Is ‘Agile’ keeping us too focused on ‘building stuff?’
The Agile Metrics Survey 2020 Design: Usually, we start an initiative or project by defining what success would look like and how we would learn that we are successful. Which immediately points at metrics of all kinds. This approach is not different for any attempt to become agile, to turn into a learning organization—at least it should not be.
The question is which metrics have been proven to be successful in the past to support that approach. In other words: is there life beyond velocity?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #211—shared with 23,728 peers—celebrates John Cutler’s Feature Factory Reloaded; we bust the myth that not having a Sprint Goal would be okay, and we learn how to maximize collaboration time with distributes teams.
We also ask: Is it time to eliminate Scrum’s specialized role of the Product Owner? We then delve into how to gain a competitive edge, and we consider basing our product thinking on a set of fundamental propositions.
Lastly, we enjoy Shane Parrish’s excursion into the mental model behind root cause analysis.
Last year, I ran a (non-representative) survey on how Scrum Masters are allocating their time when working with a single Scrum Team. Much to the surprise of many readers, the direct Scrum Master engagement with a single Scrum Team of average size and a typical 2-week Sprint turned out to be about 12 hours per week.
This result immediately prompted two additional questions: What is a Scrum Master doing during the rest of the week, and in what way does a Scrum Master’s work manifest itself over time? While answering the above question requires additional research and data collection, the latter can be answered to a certain grade by focusing on a few common scenarios.
The first article of this series will address the Scrum Master engagement with the Development Team.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #210—shared with 23,637 peers—analyzes why customer journey teams may be superior to cross-functional teams; we enjoy a list of anti -agile personality types, and we listen to Mr. DevOps on how to build high-performance organizations.
We also help product managers to understand user research better; we delve into the most annoying collaboration mistakes of product teams, and we grasp the prerequisites of product-market fit.
Lastly, we thank Andy Cleff for compiling a list of approaches to measure team health and morale.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #209—shared with 23,558 peers—delves into Design Thinking habits; we consider how to turn dark ‘agile’ into a value-driven approach again, and we go back once again to antipatterns of organizational agility.
We also address validating hypotheses beyond an ordinary A/B-test; we learn how to orchestrate continuous experimentation for fun and profit, and we applaud Jeff Gothelf for sharing the second version of the Lean UX canvas with the community.
Lastly, we put ‘bugs’ into an agile context, starting with a moth in 1946.
