TL; DR: Taming Complexity — Food for Agile Thought #366
Welcome to the 366th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 36,188 peers. This week, we identify five practical ways of taming complexity to avoid feature creep and pushing away users and share “examples of organizations that operate beyond the traditional set of agile practices and have been able to break down the bureaucratic hierarchy by adopting radical forms of consent, participation, and self-management.” Also, we have a look at building high-trust teams at Shopify in a remote working world, and suggest shifting “from leading with goals to leading with questions,” referring to Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.
Then, we point out that many companies may run experiments to test product ideas with users and customers; however, they fail to follow up with meaningful action. Following this example of failing innovation, we share lessons learned from a 100-plus-year-old company that is still a market leader, trying to innovate itself out of decline. Moreover, we appreciate a global benchmarking survey on activation rates with participants from Expedia, Grammarly, Canva, Duolingo, and others and examine the Lean UX Canvas in detail, pointing to shortcomings such as the need for a root cause analysis or mapping dependencies.
Finally, we share a primer on why “interviewing stakeholders provides helpful information about their context, [allowing] us to identify business goals they are concerned with, and increases their support.” And we close this edition of the newsletter with a video that explains what it takes to successfully use OKRs and points to common anti-patterns in their application, from tying them to compensation to excessive use.
