Food for Agile Thought #358: Scaling Innovation, #NoBacklogs, Studies on Cross-Functional Teams, Product Health Check

Welcome to the 358th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 35,833 peers. My name is Stefan Wolpers.

This week, Steven Sinofsky analyzes the challenges of scaling innovation, delving into concepts, tools, culture, and change. Also, Allan “Nuke the backlog” Kelly delves into the current discussion regarding the Product Backlog’s usefulness. Furthermore, we analyze research papers on cross-functionality from Google Scholar and point to the moment when deteriorating software quality insects with a higher demand for new features.

Then, Wes Kao and Lenny Rachitsky cover how to engage your audience and improve your communication for product success. Moreover, we dissect aspects of product leadership, from strategic thinkers to the get-it-done thinkers, and we explain the negative consequences of employing SAFe® for product management, for example, its obsession with process.

Finally, we share Brad Dunn’s new approach to product management: replace the product manager role with a value manager and a discovery engineer. Additionally, we provide a concept of gathering health indicators to support better product decisions, plus a canvas to help you “avoid creating the right solution to the wrong problem.”

PS: 🗞 Did you miss past issues? No worries, here we go: 357, 356.

🎓 Advance your understanding of facilitation and decision-making practices by attending the Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills on September 29, 2022 — there are three community tickets available at a 50 % premiere discount! (Please reach out to me if you are interested in attending.)

🏆 Tip of the Week

In this essay, Steven Sinofsky analyzes the challenges of innovating at scale, delving into concepts, tools, culture, and change: "Innovation in the Context of Success."

➿ Agile & Scrum

• Allan “Nuke the backlog” Kelly delves into the current discussion regarding the Product Backlog’s usefulness as a prelude to his talk on September 5 at the 44th Hands-on Agile meetup: "Backlogs, #NoBacklog(s) and comfort blankets."

• Terem Technologies: Scott Middleton aggregated research papers on cross-functionality from Google Scholar with at least 115 and up to 1,265 citations: "Cross-Functional Teams: A Summary of 20 Popular Studies."

• Lithespeed opposes the idea that technical debt is always something negative. Instead, we should consider it a way to “convey the costs associated with deferred maintenance or investment in technology:” "It's Time to Reframe How We Think about Technical Debt."

• Medium: Mario Caropreso analyzes the tipping point when deteriorating software quality insects with a higher demand for new features: "The False Trade-off Between Quality and Speed."
  
  

🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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

• 🎙 In this podcast, Wes Kao and Lenny Rachitsky cover how to engage your audience and improve your communication for product success: "Persuasive communication and managing up."

• John Cutler dissects aspects of product leadership, from strategic thinkers wondering whether there is a strategy in the first place to the get-it-done thinkers, convinced that the “leadership just keeps changing priorities:” "Navigating the Product Leadership Fog."

• Shaw Li explains the negative consequences of employing SAFe® for product management, for example, its obsession with process: "Why training in SAFe or scaling agile is wrong for PMs early in their careers."
  
  

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Medium: Brad Dunn shares his new approach to product management: replace the product manager role with a value manager and a discovery engineer: "Bi-Directional Product Management."

• Department of Product: Richard Holmes shares his concept of gathering health indicators to support better product decisions: "How to Conduct a Product Health Check."

• Medium: Leandro Carvalho created a canvas to help you “avoid creating the right solution to the wrong problem:” "Data Product Canvas — A practical framework for building high-performance data products."

🎶 Encore

• XKCD Comic: Everything has its price, even the big picture: "Universe Price Tiers."
  
  

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Sep 29 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Oct 4-5 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Oct 12 — Live Virtual Meetup: Hands-on Agile 46: Engage the Agile Fluency® Model with Diana Larsen (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.

Your Opinion Matters

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Best,