Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 12th, 2017—shared with 6,242 peers—focuses on the agile enterprise: from where the return on investment is, via balancing autonomy and accountability at Spotify, to being agile with distributed teams.
We also dive deep into product discovery and its evolution over the last 20 years, why large teams tend to fail on building great products, and why product roadmaps are still a nascent trend.
Last but not least: We enjoy the transcript of the Slack AMA with Spotify’s former VP of Product, and we silently enjoy browsing this week’s Dilbert comics.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 5th, 2017—shared with 6,508 peers—focuses on team building, how to provide feedback to hardly bearable teammates, and why radical candor is good for business and your soul. Be warned, though, transparency has a dark side, too.
We also dive deep into how the best product teams evolve beyond Agile and Lean, how to utilize guerilla research to create excellent products, and what anti-patterns to avoid if you are pursuing a career in product management.
Last but not least: We discuss patterns and ethics of how today’s technology seeks to manipulate us.
Do you remember the good old days when the organization started with its first Scrum team? And the new engineering kid on the block was “merely” supposed to deliver a potentially shippable product increment at the end of a sprint? When no one thought about how to align scrum teams?
The first team was to sound the bell for the upcoming change towards a learning organization. Little did we know back then about the challenges along that route. When teams 2, 3 and 4 joined, shipping a product increment at the end of a sprint became first complicated, and then complex.
It turns out that becoming agile does not only required to create (Scrum) teams. Reaping the full benefits of becoming agile, of becoming a learning organization built around software also requires changing engineering practices. Nowadays, it is all about continuous value delivery.
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.)
TL;DR: How to Get Hired as Scrum Master or Agile Coach
A few days ago, LinkedIn published the LinkedIn Data Reveals the Most Promising Jobs of 2017 report. The report lists the Scrum Master position among the “most promising jobs in America based on the potential for career advancement, job growth, and salary.”
The number of downloads of the “38 Scrum Master Interview Questions” book which already have exceeded 7,000 copies also reflect this positive trend. Hence, I thought it a good idea to write a new guide from a candidate’s perspective: “How to get hired as Scrum Master or Agile Coach.”
From the identification of a suitable agile organization via the interview process to preparing for trial day—everything will be created with the candidate’s goal in mind. However, to do so, I need feedback from you.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 22nd, 2017—shared with 6,173 peers—wants you to free your mind (and the agile rest will follow): Efficiency and creativity don’t make good companions, particularly if you have to resort to guerrilla innovation.
We also bust the myth that there are too many meetings in Scrum—the so familiar post-Scrum-honeymoon whining from developers.
We then dive deep into how to turn ideas into validated learnings and those into actionable user stories for the product backlog. By the way, given the abundance of ideas, you may consider learning how to say ‘no’ to create an outstanding product. Find out how to do so without burning bridges.
Last but not least: Learn how to intelligently fail while hacking the innovation culture of your organization—which is particularly useful if you are not working for Google, for example.
