TL;DR: Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns
A burn-down chart tracks the progress of a team toward a goal by visualizing the remaining work in comparison to the available time. So far, so good. More interesting than reporting a status, however, is the fact that burn-down charts also visualize Scrum anti-patterns of a team or its organization.
Learn more about discovering these anti-patterns that can range from systemic issues like queues outside a team’s sphere of influence and other organizational debt to a team’s fluency in agile practices.
TL;DR: How to Improve Stand-ups for Co-Located and Distributed Teams
You’re at another painfully slow stand-up meeting. It feels like it’s never going to end. You begin thinking to yourself, “if I casually sneak out, will anyone notice?” Stand-ups don’t have to be this way. Learn how to improve stand-ups in this guest post from Jonathan Weber.
TL;DR: Product Roadmap Failure: Stop Setting Them Up To Fail
When dealing with product roadmap failure, stop debating whether you are doing product roadmaps “right”, or whether roadmaps are evil. Look instead at the job you are hiring your roadmap to achieve. And then ask if the roadmap is the best tool for the job.
TOC
14 Common Product Roadmap Failures
A Summary of Almost all Methodology Debates on Twitter
Roadmap Needs and Being Awesome
New to Product Management? What is a product roadmap? For a standard definition see here.
The agile consulting industry repackages an originally human-centered, technology-driven philosophy into a standardized, all-weather project-risk mitigating methodology. Sold to command & control organizations, their middle managers turn “Agile” into a 21. century adoption of Taylorism for knowledge workers. Beyond this meta-level, the reasons, why engineers despise Agile, fall into five categories: Control, manipulation, monitoring, technology and teamwork.
TL; DR: Customer Care as a Litmus Test for Innovation and Agile Change
Customer care as an entity, its function, and status within a company, can act as a good litmus test for a company’s culture, its product management, and thus its potential for innovation and agile change.
If customer care is regarded solely as a cost center that needs to be outsourced, agile change is unlikely to happen in that organization.
TL;DR: Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority
Building a valuable, usable and feasible product does not happen overnight. These are my four core learnings from focusing on customer value, looking back at the projects I have been pursuing over the years.
