Food for Agile Thought #453: Product Management Organizations, Improving ProductOps, New Feature Revenue Estimations, Quo Vadis Agile?
Stefan Wolpers
?? I help Product Owners, Product Managers, Scrum Masters & Agile Coaches Grow w/ Classes, Courses, Books & Community. ?? Author of the ”Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide;” ??Trainer at Scrum.org; ?? Book a 1-on-1; talk chances!
Hello everyone!
Welcome to the 453rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,652 peers.
This week, we feature insights from Melissa Perri, who provides a framework for robust product management organizations focusing on alignment, efficiency, and continuous improvement. Stefan Lindegaard warns about Organizational Debt Syndrome and the need for proactive leadership to maintain agility, and Jennifer Riggins reveals a study highlighting developers’ lost productivity due to management inefficiencies, stressing better communication. Also, Evan Leybourn discusses the future of Agile, shifting from anecdotes to data-driven insights. At the same time, Terry Danylak shares strategies to move from firefighting to proactive management, enhancing productivity and workplace health.
Then, Itamar Gilad critiques the “user-needs-first” approach, advocating for a flexible strategy that aligns ideas with company goals for high-impact products. John Cutler suggests that percentage allocations obscure priorities and advocates prioritizing based on value and urgency, and Jon Odo provides five tips for trimming Product Backlogs, emphasizing removing outdated and unclear items to boost team efficiency. Moreover, Zach Dunn highlights the pitfalls of overestimating revenue from sales feedback and offers strategies to avoid these mistakes when prioritizing features.
Lastly, Johanna Rothman advocates for continual planning over quarterly planning to help agile teams adapt and deliver maximum value. Jenny Wanger introduces a product operations tool using process maps to diagnose inefficiencies and improve workflows, and Chris Matts explains Karl Weick’s Sensemaking framework for better organizational dynamics and collaboration. Jurgen Appelo presents 32 key concepts from systems thinking and complexity theory, highlighting their importance in Lean and Agile approaches. Finally, Rory Sutherland discusses marketing and behavioral science with Lenny Rachitsky, focusing on the role of psychology, product success paradoxes, and the pitfalls of metrics-driven workplaces.
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?? The Tip of the?Week
Melissa Perri: Building a Great Product Management Organization
Melissa Perri shares a comprehensive framework for building robust product management organizations. The framework focuses on organizational design, strategy, operations, and culture to ensure alignment, efficiency, continuous improvement, and high-value products to customers and stakeholders.
Author: Melissa Perri
?? Lemon of the?Week
Prateek Singh (via Medium): Killing the iPod (and?Scrum)
Prateek Singh claims Agile needs to ditch Scrum, likening it to Apple discontinuing the iPod. He suggests that true agility means abandoning the tried-and-true, ignoring that Scrum’s foundational principles remain relevant even amidst modern advancements. There is no iPhone equivalent in “Agile.”
Author: Prateek Singh
? Agile &?Scrum
Stefan Lindegaard: Organizational Debt Syndrome Poses a?Threat
Stefan Lindegaard highlights the dangers of Organizational Debt Syndrome, emphasizing the need for proactive leadership to identify and address accumulated shortcuts in culture and practices to maintain agility and competitiveness, not to mention the people.
Author: Stefan Lindegaard
Jennifer Riggins (via The New Stack): Why Do Developers Lose 1 Day a Week to Inefficiencies?
Jennifer Riggins discusses a study revealing that developers lose one day a week to inefficiencies due to management’s lack of understanding, highlighting the need for better communication and targeted improvements to boost productivity and satisfaction.
Author: Jennifer Riggins
?? Evan Leybourn (via Agile Uprising): Where is Agile going with Evan Leybourn, Business Agility Institute
Evan Leybourn from the Business Agility Institute discusses the future of Agile, sharing insights on industry trends and potential directions, moving from anecdotal evidence to more concrete data.
Author: Evan Leybourn
Terry Danylak: How To Stop Constantly Fighting Fires At?Work
Terry Danylak offers strategies for transitioning from constant firefighting to proactive management by implementing strategic systems, tactical tools, and cultural conventions. This will ultimately enhance productivity and foster a healthier work environment.
Author: Terry Danylak
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Itamar Gilad: You’re Not Just Solving User?Problems
Itamar Gilad highlights the limitations of the “user-needs-first” approach, advocating for a more flexible product development strategy that prioritizes ideas against company goals to create high-impact products.
Author: Itamar Gilad
领英推荐
John Cutler: How to Reconcile Prioritization and $/Time Allocation
John Cutler critiques using percentage allocations for strategy deployment, suggesting they obscure true priorities and expected outcomes. He advocates prioritizing based on value and urgency, treating allocations as hypotheses rather than strict guidelines.
Author: John Cutler
Jon Odo: Honey, I Shrunk the?Backlog
Jon Odo shares five tips for trimming your Product Backlog, emphasizing focus and clarity by removing outdated, non-immediate, and unclear items, ultimately enhancing team efficiency and product success.
Source: Honey, I Shrunk the Backlog
Via: Maarten Dalmijn
Zach Dunn (via Rally): Why product teams overestimate revenue from sales?feedback
Zach Dunn warns product teams about overestimating revenue based on sales feedback, highlighting four common pitfalls when prioritizing features by business value, and offers strategies to avoid these mistakes.
Author: Zach Dunn
?? Gaming?Velocity
Imagine your team’s line manager insists that a successful team improves velocity regularly. How could you, as a team, satisfy this strange, unsuitable demand without working more? How can you make gaming velocity a reality?
I run this exercise with my students of entry-level Scrum Master and Product Owner classes to help them reflect on the tricky nature of measuring success, metrics, and, of course, Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
For the following article, I aggregated suggestions from more than 50 classes on how to “best” game velocity.
Learn more: Gaming Velocity .
?? Concepts, Tools & Measuring
Johanna Rothman: Think Big, Plan Small: How to Use Continual Planning
Johanna Rothman suggests replacing quarterly planning with continual planning, enabling agile teams to adapt to changes and deliver maximum value through small, frequent deliverables and rolling wave replanning.
Author: Johanna Rothman
Jenny Wanger: My all-in-one product operations process improvement tool”
Jenny Wanger introduces an all-in-one product operations tool that uses process maps to diagnose, visualize, and prototype changes. This tool helps teams identify inefficiencies, improve workflows, and gain buy-in for future improvements.
Author: Jenny Wanger
Chris Matts: Sensemaking and Nonsensemaking
Chris Matts explains Karl Weick’s Sensemaking framework, emphasizing its importance in understanding organizational dynamics and fostering shared meaning, which enhances collaboration and navigates change effectively.
Source: Sensemaking and Nonsensemaking
Author: Chris Matts
Jurgen Appelo: 32 Key Concepts in Systems Thinking and Complexity Theory
Jurgen Appelo offers a synthesized overview of 32 key concepts from systems thinking and complexity theory. It emphasizes their foundational role in modern organizational approaches like Lean and Agile, using AI to blend insights from various discourse sources.
Author: Jurgen Appelo
?? Encore
?? Lenny Rachitsky and Rory Sutherland: What most people miss about marketing | Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK,?author)
Rory Sutherland discusses marketing and behavioral science with Lenny Rachitsky, emphasizing psychology over logic, the paradox of product success, the value of fame and timing, and the pitfalls of metrics-driven workplaces.
Source: What most people miss about marketing | Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, author)
Authors: Lenny Rachitsky and Rory Sutherland
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??? Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought?Edition
Read more: Food for Agile Thought 452: Agile Implementation Differences, Output to Outcome, LeSS Scrum Guide, Alignment Tools .
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Food for Agile Thought 453: Product Management Organizations, Improving ProductOps, New Feature Revenue Estimations, Quo Vadis Agile? was first published on Age-of-Product.com .
Thanks, Stefan Wolpers.
Helping busy product leaders build more effective team cultures via product consulting | Follow for tips on improving product operations
3 个月So many of my favorite readings from this week, and I'm delighted to be included as well!
Fortune 500 Consultant helping you level up ? Delivered $50M+ in savings for enterprises ? Follow for posts about productivity, personal development, and process improvement.
3 个月Thanks for the mention, Stefan.