Food for Agile Thought #407: Costs of Agile, Product Decision Spectrum, Ultimate JTBD Guide, Stakeholder Alignment

Welcome to the 407th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 48,702 peers. My name is Stefan Wolpers.

This week, Matt Rickard offers invaluable leadership lessons from his aerospace design experiences. Henrik Mårtensson explores the overlooked facets of Agile transition costs. Jeff Langr and Nick Goede remind us that true agility stems from core values, not mere practices. Also, Chris Combe delves into the complexities of performance reviews in Agile settings. Moreover, once again, our lemon tries to measure Developer productivity.

Then, Austin Yang underscores the significance of the decision-making process over mere outcomes in product management. Marty Cagan provides a roadmap from traditional product management to empowered product teams. Meanwhile, Jeff Gothelf points out the rare yet essential cross-functional collaboration in product discovery, emphasizing the combined effort of product management, design, and engineering.

Lastly, Lenny Rachitsky and Bob Moesta dive deep into the JTBD framework, using captivating examples from Snickers and Milky Way. Also, John Davidson sheds light on the complexities of stakeholder alignment, sharing ten indispensable lessons. Meanwhile, Johanna Rothman navigates the murky waters of project estimations, presenting a variety of techniques and highlighting the unpredictability of timeframes.

PS: 🗞 Did you miss past issues? No worries, here we go: 406, 405.

PPS: 📖 Get notified when the Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide will become available.

👉 Join the community and help create the next edition of the Scrum Master Salary Report!

🏆 Tip of the Week

🚀 Matt Rickard shares insights and wisdom from personal mistakes to guide students in his senior Aerospace design class at the University of Maryland—a treasure trove on leadership, building stuff, and project management: "Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

McKinsey & Company: The authors address the complexities of gauging developer productivity, a traditionally elusive metric, offering a “fresh approach,” qualifying them immediately for the lemon category: "Yes, you can measure software developer productivity."

➿ Agile & Scrum

• Henrik Mårtensson discusses the misconceptions about the costs of transitioning to Agile. While many companies focus on the expense of ‘Agile transformation programs,’ they overlook deeper trade-offs, leading to missed potential benefits: "Interlude: The Cost of Agile."

• Industrial Logic: Jeff Langr and Nick Goede emphasize that while many associate Agile with specific practices like Scrum, it’s actually a set of values and principles. Using particular techniques doesn’t guarantee agility; understanding and embodying Agile’s core principles does: "Prescriptive Agile: Stuck in Shu."

• Medium: Chris Combe addresses the challenge of individual performance reviews in cross-functional teams, noting the pitfalls of competitive behavior and the misalignment with Agile values. He stresses the need for leadership buy-in for systemic changes, highlighting the importance of balancing personal aspirations with team and organizational goals: "Agile performance reviews and compensation."
  
  

🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class — October 4, 2023

The Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS) training by Berlin Product People is a guaranteed one-day official Scrum.org class for advanced Scrum practitioners and agile coaches, including the industry-acknowledged PSFS certification. This PSFS training class is in English.

Enjoy the benefits of an immersive class of two compact sessions with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 o’clock CEST.

👉 New in 2023: Refresher Classes: Attend a free refresher class as a former student upon arrangement and availability.

Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class — October 4, 2023.

👉 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

• Austin Yang emphasizes that informed decision-making, not just outcomes, is vital for product managers to avoid future pitfalls: "Good decision, bad decision, indecision, and fake decision."

• Product-Led Alliance: Marty Cagan shares insights on moving successfully from a traditional product management approach to empowered product teams: "Moving to the Product Operating Modell."

• Jeff Gothelf stresses that while product discovery is ideally a collective effort of product management, design, and engineering, this cross-functional collaboration is seldom seen in practice: "Who owns product discovery?"

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• 🎙 Lenny Rachitsky interviews Bob Moesta, co-creator of the Jobs To Be Done framework, who shares insights from his vast experience, using Snickers and Milky Way as intriguing case studies. Discover best practices and pitfalls of the JTBD approach: "The Ultimate Guide to JTBD."

• UX Collective: John Davidson highlights the challenges of securing stakeholder alignment and how easily agreements can unravel. He provides ten essential lessons on achieving alignment, emphasizing its importance in various contexts, from projects to personal decisions: "Stakeholder Alignment."
  
  

• Johanna Rothman discusses the challenge of predicting when a specific feature set will start and complete, offering various estimation techniques, from detailed task breakdowns to Monte Carlo simulations, emphasizing the inherent uncertainty in such projections: "How to Predict When the Team Will Complete a Specific Backlog Item."

🎶 Encore

There are no entries to this category this week.

📖 Minimum Viable Library (2) — Product Owner Edition

The Minimum Viable Library Product Owner edition is available! Explore a series of carefully curated collections of essential books, newsletters, podcasts, and tools to elevate your agile expertise.

Read on and learn how the recommendations for Product Owners cover a wide range of topics, including product management, product discovery, escaping the feature factory, and aligning with critical stakeholders.

👉 Learn more: Minimum Viable Library (2) — Product Owner Edition.

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 August 29-30 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 September 5 — Meetup: Hands-on Agile #53: An Agile Coaches Guide to Storytelling w/ Bob Galen (English)
• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 September 26-29 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 October 4 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Training (PSFS; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 October 10 — Meetup: Overcoming Common Product Backlog Management Traps w/ David Pereira
• 🖥 🇩🇪 October 30-31 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; German)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 November 1-2 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; German)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 November 21-24 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 November 28 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Training (PSFS; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 December 11-12 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; German)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 December 13-14 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 December 18-19 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; German)

See all upcoming classes here.

📺 Youtube Channel

• Joe Justice: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business — Hands-on Agile EXTRA.

Your Opinion Matters

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Best,