TL; DR: Story Points Made Simple, The Art Part of Product Management — Food for Agile Thought #337
Welcome to the 337th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,011 peers. This week, we join Tim Ottinger, exploring the truth about story points and inviting the rest of the community to join. We also delve into patterns of agile transformations, from psychological safety to the “illusion of control,” and we cover engineering team success tactics from making all work visible to WiP limits to utilizing velocity right.
We then share an engaging canvas on the opportunities and realities of picking work by product teams. Moreover, we explore the criticality of human skills for product management—the Six Cs from communication to consciousness, while pointing out that successful products are typically not the work of a single genius with a magic touch but teamwork. Also, Roman Pichler delved into your questions on the role of the Product Owner, ranging from product manager vs. Product Owner vs. business analyst to the right size of a Product Backlog to linking product vision to Product Goal and Sprint Goal.
Then, based on Annie Duke’s work from “Thinking in Bets,” First Round Capital provides a guide on helpful mental models to support decision-making in teams and organizations, not just startups. On top of that, Lean Agile Intelligence aggregated a valuable list of resources on beneficial team metrics. Finally, we listen to Hà Phan, who advocates that “machine learning (ML) can be a key tool to gain the most effective data about your users.”
