Food for Thought’s issue #98—shared with 9,655 peers—deals with understanding complexity and agile transition challenges. Finally, there is an introduction to Cynefin that’s readable. We also learn that abandoning ‘project thinking’ and embracing ‘product thinking’ is at the heart of transforming an organization.
We then turn to Cost of Delay and its tricky quantification problems. And Ron Jeffries muses about a new software development framework.
On the product side, we cherish an epic curriculum of 75-plus product management related articles, and we get to know the difference between the product manager and the product owner role.
Finally, we gain insight into prototype planning by user story mapping, and we address how to overcome passive resistance from stakeholders.
Food for Thought’s issue #97—shared with 9,483 peers—deals with abandoning Scrum in favor of Kanban, how effective teams work, and why they need psychological safety to get the job done.
We also try to understand why the people from the executive level—despite their best intentions—fail to understand agile, and what enterprise agility is all about.
On the product side, we come to understand why crappy product roadmaps still exist. (Let’s start at the requirements level, shall we?) Perhaps, a public roadmap might solve the problem, check out 50 plus of those aggregated by Federico Wengi.
Finally, we have a sneak preview at the first chapter of ‘Product Leadership’ by Martin Eriksson and Nate Walkingshaw.
The following 56 scrum product owner theses describe the role of the PO from a holistic product creation perspective.
The 56 product owner theses cover the concept of the product owner role, product discovery, how to deal with external and internal stakeholders, product roadmap planning, as well as the product backlog refinement. The theses also address the product owner’s part in scrum ceremonies such as sprint planning, sprint review, and the sprint retrospective.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of June 18th, 2017—shared with 9,329 peers—clarifies why agile is by no means a silver bullet, and why there are no Scrum heroes. (Yub, Scrum is a rockstar free zone as there is no I in ‘team.’)
We then learn about flow theory, the theory of constraints, systems thinking, as well as lead and cycle time first hand from the example of Henry Ford and the Model T.
On the product side, we come to understand that measuring of what customers want is impossible, and that ‘idea debt’ needs to eliminated to be creative. We also learn when to say and how to say no to our bosses.
What ceremony could better embody scrum’s ‘inspect and adapt’ mantra than the sprint retrospective? I assume all agile peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, or in the worst case having none at all. And there is always room for improvement. Learn more about 21 common sprint retrospective anti-patterns.
Age of Product’s Food for Thought of June 11th, 2017—shared with 9,176 peers—doubts that Jeff Sutherland’s “Twice the Work in Half the Time” was helpful for the agile cause. We also join John Cutler who is growing tired of the agile bashing where agile is being made responsible for everything your organization fails at. Probably—just a thought—an agile transition needs more time than the suits were willing to allocate in their proposal to the board.
On the product side, we learn about twelve principles of running experiments, and how to gather feedback from stakeholders while avoiding that your product is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Lastly: Do you remember the workshop when you built a lego duck for the first time? We have a great story on how Lego managed to return from the brink of collapse.
