TL; DR: Influencing Without Authority, Leaps of Product Faith — Food for Agile Thought #325

Welcome to the 325th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,942 peers. This week, we delve into influencing without authority, from framing to social proof to inception to storytelling. We also suggest that engineers also need to improve strategic decision-making skills instead of only focusing on technical execution skills, and we shed light on structural and instantiated dependencies and how they impede flow in an organization that scales agile practices.

We then reflect on a recent statement of a CPO: ‘I wouldn’t call it blind faith, but more like informed faith. […] But, really, there’s a leap of faith involved.’ We believe that DoorDash’s recent decision to have everyone ‘eat DoorDash’s own dog food’ once a month is merely empathy theater. Also, we point at the benefits of formalizing learning plans to keep your skills as a product person competitive and share how to do so.

Lastly, we explore the 9th principle of the Agile Manifesto: ‘Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.’ Moreover, we point out four beneficial leadership coaching techniques, from outcome shift to uncovering limiting beliefs.

TL; DR: MAHD — Agile for Hardware, Product Ops Overview — Food for Agile Thought #324

Welcome to the 324th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,869 peers. This week, we provide a primer for the Modified Agile for Hardware Development (MAHD) framework and its differences from generic Scrum. Also, we aim to understand the implication of growth and fixed mindsets for change, communication, and collaboration, and we challenge you to think about your office space from an anthropological point of view: Does it generate competition or collaboration between tribes?

We then share a list of helpful and damaging definitions of what Product Ops represents, and we move to download the free 7th ‘State of Product Management’ report based on the responses from over 2,000 product managers. Moreover, we point at a necessary trait of successful product teams: While using the big pictures to guide their work, they can also ship new stuff.

Lastly, we explore ways of measuring the predictability of teams, from ‘say/do’ to ‘meeting expectations’ to ‘aging WIP,’ and we point at a critical component of any innovation validation track to allow for an informed decision process: The experiment. Finally, we suggest a different approach to dealing with complex organizations and their inherent challenges: Knowing where to look for problems by figuring out who reports to whom.

TL; DR: Fortress Agile, The Technical PM — Food for Agile Thought #323

Welcome to the 323rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 33,816 peers. This week, we share practical tips for the Fortress Agile on caring for the humans in your team when the organization is less agile than we would need it to be. Additionally, we share Charlie Munger’s magnum opus on why we behave the way we do, and we point to an observation that failure cultures focus on delivering things instead of value.

We then provide five highly actionable tips on becoming a more technical product manager. Moreover, we share successful product-led development patterns, and we ask: Do You Have a Product Mindset?

Lastly, we appreciate the first of a series of articles on becoming good at influence mapping, and we point at the elephant in the room: What if — despite all efforts — customer behavior isn’t moving in the right direction?

PS: 🎄 Happy Holiday Season!

PPS: 🗞 Food for Agile Thought will be back on January 9, 2022, with issue 324. Stay tuned!