Food for Agile Thought #356: Decision-Making 2.0, North Star Template & Activity Library, Tesla's Agile Success

Welcome to the 356th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 35,752 peers. My name is Stefan Wolpers.

This week, we will learn from psychologist Gary Klein how to improve decision-making, particularly as a team, from the benefits of pre-mortems and anonymous voting to the perils of consensus. Also, we detail Tesla’s approach to agility; we explain Sam Kaner et al.’s Diamond of Participation graphic for facilitators, and we encourage you to participate in the survey for the 16th State of Agile report.

Then, we delve into empathy as the superpower of successful product people, enabling the understanding of seemingly tricky stakeholders. Moreover, we suggest to stop “using ‘product market fit’ and instead focus on delivering value to your first ten customers,” and we applaud John Cutler for sharing the template & activity library for the North Star Framework. Following up on the interview with Gary Klein, we also suggest starting your product discovery journey with a pre-mortem: Imagine it is six months later and your product went south; what caused its failure?

Finally, we analyze commonalities and differences in product teams of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, only to return to a classic session from 2012: Marty Cagan shares lessons learned on building products that customers love.

PS: 🗞 Did you miss past issues? No worries, here we go: 355, 354.

📈 🔬 Join 470-plus peers and contribute to the anonymous poll for the upcoming free ‘Product Owner and Product Manager Salary Report 2022!’

🏆 Tip of the Week

🎙 Farnam Street: Shane Parrish interviews psychologist Gary Klein on how to improve decision-making, particularly as a team. They cover many issues, from the benefits of pre-mortems and anonymous voting to the perils of consensus: "Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions #144."

👉 Pair with Marcus Castenfors’s article on how to run pre-mortems; see below.

➿ Agile & Scrum

• Joe Justice and Arnaud Viguié detail Tesla’s approach to agility: "Tesla Agile Success."

• Chris Corrigan explains Sam Kaner et al.’s Diamond of Participation graphic to help you facilitate and improve your teams’ ways of decision making: "The Diamond of Participation."
  
  

• 📈 Digital.ai: Hurry up; the survey for the 16th State of Agile report is still available for another few days: "16th State of Agile: Survey Closes on August 26th 2022."

🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Hands-on Agile #45: FAST: An Innovative Way to Scale w/ James Shore on September 27, 2022

How can multiple teams work together on a single product? The common wisdom is to carefully align teams and responsibilities to create autonomous teams. But, invariably, this approach eventually runs into cross-team bottlenecks, challenges aligning responsibilities to teams, and difficulties creating cross-functional teams.

Fluid Scaling Technology, or FAST, is an innovative new approach that solves these problems. It uses frequent team self-selection to prevent bottlenecks, share knowledge amongst teams, and ensure the right people are working on the right things. It’s simple and lightweight.

Join James Shore as he shares his experiences with scaling Agile—first with traditional approaches, and more recently with FAST. Learn what works, what doesn’t, and how you can try FAST in your organization.

RSVP now: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Hands-on Agile #45: FAST: An Innovative Way to Scale w/ James Shore on September 27, 2022.

👉 From time to time, we can offer last-minute seats for training classes at cost to individuals who do not have access to a corporate training budget. If you like to be notified about these opportunities, please register here.

🎯 Product

• Roman Pichler delves into empathy as the superpower of successful product people, enabling the understanding of seemingly tricky stakeholders: "Empathy in Product Management."
  
  

• Daniel Elizalde suggests to stop “using ‘product market fit’ and instead focus on delivering value to your first ten customers:” "The Problem with Product Market Fit (and What to Use Instead)."

• 🎙 In this podcast, Rich Mironov covers a broad spectrum of product roadmap-relates topics, from purpose to perspectives to product strategy: "Customers are more forgiving about roadmaps than sales teams."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Amplitude: John Cutler shares the template & activity library for the North Star Framework: "North Star Framework Template & Activity Library."
  
  

• Crisp: Marcus Castenfors suggest starting your product discovery journey with a pre-mortem: Imagine it is six months later and your product went south; what caused its failure? "This might just be the highest leverage Product Discovery activity that your team can do."

🎶 Encore

• Itamar Gilad analyses commonalities and differences in product teams of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google: "Should We Work Like FAANG?"
  
  

• 📺 Mind The Product: In this classic from 2012, Marty Cagan shares lessons learned on building products that customers love: "Learnings from London: Marty Cagan on making products customers love."

📺 Jeff Gothelf: Outcome-Based Product Planning — Hands-on Agile 43

In this energizing 43rd Hands-on Agile session on outcome-based product planning, Jeff Gothelf clarified one thing: “Roadmapping is a flawed concept in the age of Agile. Maps, by their definition, are linear, and we don’t build linear products and services anymore. We build continuous systems.”

Learn more about what he considers product roadmap flaws and what you can do about them!

Watch the video now: Jeff Gothelf: Outcome-Based Product Planning — Hands-on Agile 43.

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 Aug 29-30 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Sep 5 — Live Virtual Meetup: Hands-on Agile #44: Honey, I Shrunk the Backlog w/ Allan Kelly (English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Sep 6-9 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Sep 26-27 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Agile Leadership Essentials Training (PAL-E; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Sep 27 — Live Virtual Meetup: Hands-on Agile #45: FAST: An Innovative Way to Scale w/ James Shore (English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Oct 4-5 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Oct 18-21 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO-A; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Oct 31-Nov 3 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; English)

See all upcoming classes here.

📺 Youtube Channel

• Jeff Gothelf: Outcome-Based Product Planning — Hands-on Agile 43.

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Best,