Food for Agile Thought #413: Firing Agile Coaches? Are All Feature Factories Bad? Why Didn’t They Say No? Dumb Decision?

Welcome to the 413th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 49,262 peers. My name is Stefan Wolpers.

This week, Anthony Mersino sheds light on the reduction in agile coaching staff owing to financial constraints and urges a focus on continuous improvement to prove value. David Rodenas discusses the misguided adoption of “Agile” due to a lack of understanding, and Marty Cagan emphasizes holistic organizational involvement in digital transformations. Additionally, Joost Minnaar advocates for subtraction over addition in workplace transformation, promoting identifying and eliminating unnecessary tasks for more effective change.

Then, Sam Gimbel addresses the general disdain towards ‘feature factories,’ advocating for a more nuanced approach and customer-centric development. John Cutler delves into the tendency of teams to overcommit, attributing it to a culture of affirmative bias and advocating for realistic engagement in work commitments. Moreover, Kilian Butler narrates Papercup’s experience in machine learning product development, offering practical insights to help others navigate this challenging yet rewarding domain.

Lastly, Jimmy Janlén explores blending Scrum and Kanban for optimized workflows, providing a roadmap for an informed choice or fusion of these agile frameworks. Oscar Ibars discusses the art of saying ‘no’ in Product Management to maintain realistic project scopes. Paweł Huryn delves into Product-Led Growth strategies, emphasizing customer-centric approaches for product growth. Also, David Perell shares 50 insightful ideas focusing on critical thinking, human behavior understanding, and system optimization, introducing principles like Inversion, Doublespeak, and the Theory of Constraints.

🧪 Experiment of the Week: Join the free beta test of my upcoming Mastering Scrum online class — seats are limited!

PS: 🗞 Did you miss past issues? No worries, here we go: 412, 411.

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

👉 Join 400-plus peers and help create the next edition of the Scrum Master Salary Report!

🏆 Tip of the Week

Vitality Chicago Inc.: Anthony Mersino discusses the downsizing of agile coaching staff due to cost-cutting, Agile saturation, coaching quality, and scrutinized ROI. He urges coaches to focus on continuous improvement, mastery, and setting clear exit criteria to demonstrate value and avoid unexpected termination: "Should We Fire All the Agile Coaches?"

🍋 Lemon of the Week

Reddit: This week’s Lemon’s author, a developer with eight years of agile experience, expresses frustrations over Scrum’s demanding meeting schedule, lack of time for unplanned work, and rigidity, ignoring the fact that someone sold them snake oil disguised as Scrum: "I'm really fed up with Scrum please enlighten me."

➿ Agile & Scrum

• Medium: David Rodenas Rodenas points out the irony of smart individuals making misguided decisions in adopting “Agile.“ By analyzing an influential article laden with poor practices masked as Agile requisites, he underscores the necessity of a genuine understanding and humble approach to harness Agile’s potential effectively: "Smart People Take Dumb Decisions When Applying Agile."

• Silicon Valley Product Group: Marty Cagan delves into the common pitfalls of digital transformations. He underscores the crucial roles of holistic organizational involvement, competent product teams, and real-world, experienced guidance in navigating toward a fruitful outcome: "Transformation Fail."

• Corporate Rebels: Joost Minnaar highlights the importance of subtraction over addition in workplace transformation. Through exercises, he encourages people to identify what to stop doing, emphasizing that removal often leads to more effective organizational change than the common tendency of adding tasks or policies: "Rethinking Workplace Transformation: The Art of Subtraction."

🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class — November 28, 2023

The Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS) training by Berlin Product People is a guaranteed 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 — November 28, 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

• Sam Gimbel critiques the broad-brush derision of 'feature factories,' urging a nuanced understanding. He proposes reflective questions to differentiate mere output focus from genuine customer-centric development, thus aiding leaders in identifying and navigating the real issues: "When is a Feature Factory...not?"

• John Cutler explores the complex dynamics leading teams to overcommit despite apparent unfeasibility. Through a myriad of scenarios, he unravels a culture of affirmative bias driven by fear, lack of experience, miscommunication, and the dire need for a more assertive, realistic engagement in work commitments: "Why Didn't They Say No?"

• Papercup: Kilian Butler shares Papercup’s journey in developing a machine learning-centric product, emphasizing the uniqueness of such endeavors. Through practical insights, he hopes to guide others in navigating the exciting yet challenging realm of ML product development: "Building machine learning products: lessons from Papercup's product team."

• Harvard Business Review: Jeffrey Bussgang and Oliver Jay discuss the pitfalls of Product-Led Growth (PLG) in software companies, highlighting the importance of early transition planning to an enterprise model, using MongoDB’s evolution as a case study for successful scalability beyond PLG: "How Software Companies Can Avoid the Trap of Product-Led Growth."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• 📺 Jimmy Janlén explains Scrum and Kanban’s unique and common features, guiding teams in melding elements from both to craft an optimized workflow. By delving into their origins, core principles, and practical application scenarios, he lays out a roadmap for an informed, context-driven choice between, or a blend of, these agile frameworks: "Scrum and or Kanban, a pragmatic comparison."

• Medium: Oscar Ibars humorously navigates the crucial yet delicate art of saying ‘no’ in Product Management, ensuring a balance between nurturing ideas and maintaining realistic project scopes: "The Art of the ‘Nope’ in Product Management."

• Pawel Huryn outlines Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategies emphasizing customer value, covering customer acquisition and activation, and underscoring the universal applicability of discussed methods for achieving product growth: "Product-Led Growth 101 (1/2)."

🎶 Encore

• David Perell shares 50 life-changing ideas, emphasizing critical thinking, understanding human behavior, and optimizing systems. He explores principles like Inversion, Doublespeak, Theory of Constraints, and others, aiming to provoke curiosity and enhance thinking processes:"50 Ideas That Changed My Life."

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 October 10 — Meetup: Overcoming Common Product Backlog Management Traps w/ David Pereira
• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 November 1-2 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 November 8 — Meetup:Designing Agile Ecosystems with Org Topologies™ w/ Alexey Krivitsky and Roland Flemm (Free; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 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; English)

See all upcoming classes here.

📺 Youtube Channel

• Jim Highsmith: Wild West to Agile — An Interview with the Co-Creator of the Agile Manifesto.

Your Opinion Matters

Would you like to suggest a post for next week's edition or provide general feedback? You can reply to this email, or contact stefan@age-of-product.com.

If you like the newsletter, please forward it to a friend or colleague—it would mean a lot to me! 🙏

If you want to receive even more news, just follow @AgeOfProduct or @StefanW on Twitter for your daily dose.

Last, but not least: If you are a first time reader of this newsletter, click here to subscribe and join 49,263 peers.

Best,