Life is a negotiation; why would Scrum be different, particularly given its egalitarian nature? As you may recall, no one on a Scrum team can tell anyone else what to do, how to do it, or when to do it. Instead, solving your customers’ problems in a complex environment requires communication skills, empathy, patience, diplomacy, and professionalism. So let’s have a look at some typical agile negotiation scenarios.
Welcome to the 391st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 46,445 peers. This week, Tiago Forte shares the essence of his massively popular book on productivity, supporting your second brain. Also, we address proven techniques that will ‘help you to effectively communicate your vision and get buy-in from your team for your change,’ and we examine three approaches that exceptional teams use to accept failure at individual, group, and organization-wide levels, allowing them to learn, develop, and enhance their performance.
Then, we point to a video game practice that is highly effective for products, too: Games help users become more skilled throughout their journey, as onboarding is a continuous process. John Cutler answers, ‘What are you working on right now, and why is it the most important thing you could be working on?’ in all the wrong ways, and we explain different approaches to learning whether a customer might buy from the worst way to one that actually works. Moreover, Stripe’s CTO David Singleton describes how to build a product-minded engineering team that excels at planning and prioritizing at scale.
Finally, Charles Lambdin applies some ideas from the past to create products today, from Lenin’s concepts of commandism and tailism to Marx’s notions of struggle and contradiction. (Think of it as a kind of intellectual stretching.) We also talk about vanity metrics and share that it is primarily our lack of courage that leads us to seek refuge in estimates instead of facing the undeniable truth that software development inherently involves risks.
The most popular discussion on LinkedIn last week was: 🤬 Rant: Scrum Masters are no Project Managers!
Agile leadership is tricky, covering a lot of ground, from team building, decision-making, servant leadership, and self-management to including everyone and giving everyone a voice—to name a few of the challenges.
In the past, I found the following books beneficial to better understand the problem and solution space agile leadership. Moreover, you can significantly improve your leadership game as Scrum Master, agile coach, or manager for less than $ 200—an excellent investment from a professional perspective.
Welcome to the 390th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 46,277 peers. This week, we ask a simple question: Is AI replacing Developers a likely future? In the meantime, we delve into the importance of (software) architecture in an agile context, suggest alleviating some of the additional cognitive load developers shouldering with DevOps, and deep-dive into lessons learned on overcoming long-standing behaviors and winning hearts and minds.
Then, we suggest that as a product leader, you must ensure that you negotiate the right aspects by going beyond debating solutions and delving deeper to reach a consensus. Moreover, Itamar Gilad cautions against using generative AI to produce product management artifacts, pointing to serious tradeoffs, and Mike Cohn dissects a familiar template, looking at the “elements, advantages, and drawbacks of the three-part story template.”
Finally, we advocate using OKRs with Story Maps to support your release strategy, list positive attributes your goals should reflect, and cherish the ProductOps Manifesto. Lastly, we applaud Matt Schlicht for creating an epic intro to the latest AI trend; we might all become managers, herding bots.
ChatGPT can be an excellent tool for those who know how to create prompts. The simplest form of prompting ChatGPT is to feed it the task and ask for results. However, this approach is unlikely to trigger the best response from the model.
Instead, invest more time in prompt engineering, and provide ChatGPT with a better context of the situation, desired outcomes, data, constraints, etc.
The free ‘60 ChatGPT Prompts for Scrum Masters & Product Owners Guide’ will help you learn to do that:
Cannot see the form? Please click here.
Prompt: “I want you to act as an experienced Scrum Master. Please [insert your task here.]”
Examples of tasks:
Finally, should everything fail, there is another nifty trick: You can use ChatGPT to create ChatGPT prompts!
Learn more by downloading the complete 60 ChatGPT Prompts Guide!
ChatGPT 4: A Bargain for Scrum Practitioners?
ChatGPT Prompts for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Developers
Agile Transformation: ChatGPT or McBoston?
A ChatGPT Job Interview for a Scrum Master Position
ChatGPT Product Owner Job Interview — Will You Compete for a Position w/ an LLM Soon?
Agility and Scrum According to OpenAI’s ChatGPT — Be Surprised!
Is self-management an essential building block on an organization’s path to business agility or a nice-to-have cultural twist to, for example, keep teams happy and attract new talent?
While many people, particularly at the management level, are skeptical about the concept, I am convinced that organizations need to descale and regroup around aligned, autonomous, self-managing teams in a complex environment. Ultimately, only the people closest to the customers’ problems can solve those within the given constraints while contributing to an organization’s sustainability.
Please continue reading and delve into the reasons that support self-management.
