Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 10th, 2016 covers 10th Annual State of Agile™ report, dives deep into how to build trust with engineers; we also shed some light on habits of agile people.
We also show how to manage creativity (yes, it’s doable), dive into Agile Fluency, introduce the MVPM, and learn the reasons behind bloatware.
Last, but least, we go for product management for IoT and platforms, and changing the roadmap mid-course. Finally, it’s about Tesla & Apple, why disruption is initially often dubbed “a toy” and the dark side of the culture fit hype and why it’s posing a threat to creativity and innovation.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 3rd, 2016 covers agile metrics and why some of those popular with bean counters are useless, Kanban maturity patterns, Agile and TPS (Toyota Production System), leading by OKRs, and how to live in a world we don’t understand. (Aka: antifragile.)
We also make customer development interviews easier, burn product requirement documents, and invite you to join GV’s design sprint week, starting April 18th.
Last, but least the myth of the single, heroic inventor gets rendered obsolete—spoiler alert: it’s a group effort—, and we urge you to have a look at an epic Oculus Rift review. (Yes, VR is closing in on becoming a trend.) And we share the secret sauce of talent hiring that all great tech companies use to their advantage.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 27th, 2016 covers why Agile is dead, and why you shouldn’t hire product managers. A16Z general partner Lars Dalgaard explains how to scale a company and its culture, and that it’s possible to run 12 user tests per week, and design has an impact on technology in Silicon Valley.
We talk about how to tackle technical debt, what Peter Drucker means for Scrum, and that Agile is at least causing problems.
Apropos problems: #34 provides tips for better backlog refinement and sprint planning events, points to a great poster on Agile coaches/ Scrum masters, and reports in the increasing troubles of on-demand startups. And finally, we talk about Jeff Bezos’ leadership principles.
The agile consulting industry repackages an originally human-centered, technology-driven philosophy into a standardized, all-weather project-risk mitigating methodology. Sold to command & control organizations, their middle managers turn “Agile” into a 21. century adoption of Taylorism for knowledge workers. Beyond this meta-level, the reasons, why engineers despise Agile, fall into five categories: Control, manipulation, monitoring, technology and teamwork.
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.
