Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 20th, 2016 covers how to get out of the feature bloat epidemic, Intercom’s product prioritization rules, and how to spot a problem worth solving.
Also: How to use basic psychology to build a customer base, product management at the enterprise level, how to tame engineers—a 12 min crash course, scaling agile with LeSS, and the 9th Annual State of Agile™ Survey. Speaking of which: is agile costing too much? And how do we spot new technology trends? And why will blockchain change the billions of lives?
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 13th, 2016 covers Agile team building from coaching and engineering perspectives, agile leadership, 15 years into the Agile Manifesto, discovery coaches, Product Hunt’s magic rise, product portfolio management with stage-gates in the era of Agile, how to run corporate design sprints, the psychology of stupid mistakes, workaholism, is messaging more a distraction than supportive and the art of failing upward.
Welcome to Age of Product’s page to download ebooks on agile issues for free.
We like to provide you with hands-on agile lessons learned to make your life simpler. For example, if you’re looking to hire a Scrum Master, we have a free ebook for you, featuring 47 questions and answers. So, you can more quickly identify candidates with an agile mindset.
If you are the new Scrum master in the team, you may want to get up to speed as fast as possible. And there’s a PDF for that, too: we compiled a handy list of 22 questions, which provide a solid start for your first day on the new Scrum Master position.
If you are in doubt that “agile” is working well within your organization, we have a questionnaire (featuring 25 detailed questions) available to you at no cost. With this questionnaire, you can quickly organize a poll and check the state of “agile” health of your organization!
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 6th, 2016 covers innovation & economics, the concept of design sprints, and questions the state of Lean startup. It also provides a PDF to detect cargo cult agile in the organization, covers trends in product discovery, bloatware and feature creep. It covers better product roadmap techniques, leadership when scaling agile, how to start an agile transition at the enterprise level. Last, but not least, #31 deals with the dark side of Scrum, the psychology of team, and contains a great interview with Marc Andreessen and Clayton Christensen on competence and disruption.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 28th, 2016 covers: Cargo cult coaching, organizations w/o Steve Jobs, customer care as a litmus test for agile change, becoming ‘agile’ because of competitors, Google’s way to performing teams, motivating stakeholders to come with problems, not solutions, the true nature of MVPs and product/market fit, how to prioritize product features, shipping v0 products, essential tools (two great lists), and finally failure, risk and basic income in Silicon Valley.
TL; DR: Customer Care as a Litmus Test for Innovation and Agile Change
Customer care as an entity, its function, and status within a company, can act as a good litmus test for a company’s culture, its product management, and thus its potential for innovation and agile change.
If customer care is regarded solely as a cost center that needs to be outsourced, agile change is unlikely to happen in that organization.
