Food for Agile Thought #429: Product Management 2024 Report, The Feature Trap, Root Cause Analysis, Fluid Agile Teams

Welcome to the 429th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,168 peers.

This week, we delve into ProductPlan’s 2024 State of Product Management Report, unveiling evolving trends in strategic focus, measuring outcomes over outputs, aligning with customer feedback, standardizing Product Ops, and adopting AI with purpose. Tim Metz highlights the trend towards fluid, agile teams, enhancing flexibility but cautioning against the potential loss of team cohesion and burnout. The Agile Uprising podcast, featuring Chris Murman, Jay Hrcsko, and Andrew Leff, tackles “Gluttony” in agile transformation, urging a balance in work, personal growth, and relationships, and Takeshi Yoshida brings essential leadership skills for navigating the VUCA world to light, advocating for a diverse set of mental models for effective decision-making. Additionally, we explore how to get hired as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.

Then, Peter Yang shares insights on the necessity for product managers to foster product sense, empathy, and creativity, and Melissa Suzuno recounts Sandrine Veillet’s methodical and challenging journey towards implementing continuous discovery at WebMD, underlining the critical role of stakeholder engagement and team education. Michael Goitein challenges the efficacy of prioritization frameworks in product management, proposing a focus on strategic clarity to ensure product initiatives resonate with company objectives and customer needs. Moreover, Andy Budd critiques the prevalent feature-driven development model, advocating for a user experience and outcomes-focused strategy to significantly enhance product value.

Lastly, Chris Matts critically examines Kanban’s shift from manufacturing to software, emphasizing the importance of practical application. We present a guide on Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in product management for addressing issues at their source for lasting improvements, and Cedric Chin shares insights on adopting Amazon’s Weekly Business Review (WBR), underscoring Statistical Process Control principles for smarter decision-making. Finally, Randall Munroe of xkcd combines humor with physics in a unique thought experiment about a baseball pitched at nearly the speed of light.

If you are a first-time reader of this newsletter, please click here to subscribe.

👉 2 Tickets at 50 % off: Join the Professional Scrum Facilitation Class of February 15, 2024, with the code February50!

👉 Maarten Dalmijn interviewed me on my book: “I enjoyed the book a lot, and I believe it will be incredibly helpful to Scrum Teams all over the globe.”

📖 Your single best investment to improve your professional standing; order the Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide book now!

🏆 Tip of the Week

ProductPlan: The 2024 State of Product Management Report reveals trends in strategy focus, outcome measurement, customer feedback alignment, Product Ops standardization, and reasoned AI adoption among product professionals: "The 2024 State of Product Management Annual Report."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

We do not have a lemon this week.

➿ Agile & Scrum

• Parabol Focus: Tim Metz discusses the rising trend of fluid teams in Agile, where team composition shifts as needed, enhancing flexibility and resource optimization but raising concerns about cohesion and burnout: "Fluid Teams: The Next Evolution of Agile?"

• 🎙 Agile Uprising: In this episode of the Agile Uprising podcast, Chris Murman, Jay Hrcsko, and Andrew Leff discuss “Gluttony” as a significant issue in agile transformation, focusing on the consequences of excess in work, personal development, and relationships, and advocates for mindful balance: "Gluttony, The Third Deadly Sin of Agile Transformation."

• 📺 Medium: Takeshi Yoshida discusses developing leadership skills to navigate the complexities of the VUCA world, emphasizing the Cynefin Framework and integrating diverse mental models for effective decision-making: "Navigating Uncertainty, Handling Complexity — Leadership Skills Development."

🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Product Backlog Management Cohort Class of April 2-30, 2024

Discover the Product Owner success principles in this guaranteed engaging Product Backlog Management cohort class and accelerate your professional growth and career perspective with tried & tested, hands-on practices:

• Excel at delivering value regularly — your #1 career success factor.
• Learn to distinguish between valuable and useless ideas.
• Abandon the feature factory. Instead, learn to contribute to customer and organizational success.
• Gain actionable insights, learn supportive tools, and practice everything in a safe community of like-minded peers.
• Learn to say no and build trust and rapport with stakeholders while focusing on creating value.
• Create engaging feedback loops.

Enjoy the benefits of an immersive cohort class and its community with like-minded agile peers on April 2, April 16, and April 30, 2024, from 4-7 pm CEST. The class will be offered in English.

👉 Join now: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Product Backlog Management Class of April 2-30, 2024.

🎯 Product

• Figma: Peter Yang emphasizes a product manager’s need to continually develop their product sense, empathy, and creativity, sharing lessons from his extensive career across major tech platforms: "10 Rules for Making Products that Customers Love."

• Melissa Suzuno highlights Sandrine Veillet’s journey in implementing continuous discovery at WebMD, emphasizing her systematic approach, the challenges faced, and the importance of stakeholder involvement and team training for real progress: "Product in Practice: Bringing the Discovery Habits to WebMD."

• Medium: Michael Goitein critiques prioritization frameworks in product management, advocating for strategic clarity over feature ranking to align product development with organizational goals and customer needs: "The One Reason Why Prioritization Frameworks Will Never Work, and What to Do Instead."

• Smashing Magazine: Andy Budd discusses the limitations of a feature-centric approach in product development, suggesting a shift towards understanding user experiences and outcomes to enhance product value truly: "The Feature Trap: Why Feature Centricity Is Harming Your Product."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Chris Matts critiques the adaptation of Kanban from manufacturing to software, highlighting key differences in workflow and efficiency and underscoring the importance of understanding practical application over theory: "Kanban sucks!"

• Userpilot: The article delves into the importance of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in product management, offering a detailed guide on executing RCA to identify and solve the underlying causes of issues for long-term improvement and customer satisfaction enhancement: "Root Cause Analysis in Product Management: A Step-By-Step Guide."

• Commonplace: Cedric Chin outlines a journey from understanding variation to implementing Amazon’s Weekly Business Review (WBR), emphasizing the importance of Statistical Process Control principles for data-driven decision-making: "Becoming Data Driven, From First Principles."

🎶 Encore

• 📺 XKCD Comic: Randall Munroe explores the hypothetical scenario of hitting a baseball pitched at nearly the speed of light, blending humor with physics: "What if you threw a baseball at nearly light speed?"

📯 Getting Hired as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach

Are you considering a new Scrum Master or Agile Coach job? However, you are not sure that it is the right organization? Don’t worry; there are four steps of proactive research to identify suitable employers or clients for getting hired as a Scrum Master and avoid disappointment later.

I have used those four steps for years to identify organizations I would like to work with, and they never failed me. Read on and learn how to employ search engines, LinkedIn’s people search, reach out to peers in the agile community, and analyze the event markets in the quest for your next Scrum Master job.

Learn more: Getting Hired as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Feb 15 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Training (PSFS; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Mar 5 — Live Virtual Meetup: “Agile” Does Not Work for You? Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman (English)
• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 Mar 5-6 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Mar 12-15 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; German)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 Mar 26-27 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Apr 2-30 — Live Virtual Cohort: Product Backlog Management Cohort (English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Apr 9 — Live Virtual Meetup: A Q&A on Dynamic Reteaming with Heidi Helfand (English)

See all upcoming classes here.

📺 Youtube Channel

• Michael Lloyd: Dysfunction Mapping.

Don’t Miss Out: Join the 19,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community

I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack team and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.

If you like to join now all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.

How Would You Rate this Issue?

Just click one of the following links and maybe even leave a comment:

• 😍 You made my day!
• 😐 Okayish
• 😞 You can do better!

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

Last but not least: If you are a first-time reader of this newsletter, click here to subscribe and join 42,168 peers.

Best,