Food for Agile Thought #431: Custom GPTs, Leah’s Team Guide, Agile Rehab, Inescapable Deadlines

Welcome to the 431st edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,216 peers.

This week, Lenny Rachitsky explores how custom GPTs revolutionize workplace productivity with 20 innovative applications. The Agile Uprising Podcast with Chris Murman, Jay Hrcsko, and Andrew Leff tackles the theme of gluttony within Agile, stressing the importance of balance and self-awareness. Jorn van der Schaaf shares insights into Ivy Global’s growth without traditional managerial roles, advocating for self-organization and collective decision-making, and Bryan Finster focuses on engineering solutions to enhance software delivery and job satisfaction. Additionally, the Scrum Master Salary Report 2024 offers valuable data from 1,114 participants globally, revealing an average salary of $87,800.

Then, Janna Bastow analyzes strategies for transforming potential users into devoted customers, and Leah Tharin guides on evolving product and growth team structures for enhanced agility. Moreover, Teresa Torres advises leveraging customer feedback for product evolution. At the same time, Ant Murphy explores adaptive pricing models in product-led growth, challenging conventional wisdom and encouraging innovative strategies for monetization and user acquisition.

Lastly, Noah Cantor advises tech teams on achieving flow and quality by focusing on essentials, removing dependencies, and breaking down silos for smoother operations. Also, Todd Lankford challenges the productivity myth of deadlines, revealing their demotivating impact and proposing a healthier, deadline-free approach to product development. Finally, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn explores handling professional disagreements gracefully, offering a tool for making and executing decisions with empathy to enhance team dynamics and resilience.

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👉 2 Community Tickets at 50 % off: Join the Advanced Product Backlog Management Cohort of April 2-30, 2024, with the code February50 — join for $249.50! 👈

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

🏆 Tip of the Week

Lenny Rachitsky explores the transformative potential of custom GPTs in enhancing workplace productivity, highlighting 20 creative applications across tasks, from refining product copy to optimizing sales strategies, demonstrating AI’s impact on efficiency and innovation: "You should be playing with GPTs at work."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

Medium: Ah, the tale of Jorge Valencia—a designer’s dive into the Scrum abyss, where creativity meets two-week sprint shackles. Spoiler: Merging Design Thinking with Agile is the secret sauce to outsmart Scrum’s rigidity—a sarcastic nod to flexibility saving the day in a world where practices clash: "Why designers fail to integrate into Agile teams."

➿ Agile & Scrum

• 🎙 In an Agile Uprising Podcast, Chris Murman, Jay Hrcsko, and Andrew Leff discuss exploring gluttony within Agile, highlighting its nuanced impact on balance in work, relationships, and agile mindsets, advocating for self-awareness and healthy boundaries: "Achieving Balance by Exploring Gluttony in Agile."

• Corporate Rebels: Jorn van der Schaaf details Ivy Global’s unique approach to growth without traditional managerial roles, emphasizing self-organization and collective decision-making to foster a dynamic and adaptive workplace, setting a precedent for modern organizational structures: "Ivy Global's Workplace Revolution: Navigating Growth Without Managers."

• 📺 InfoQ: Bryan Finster emphasizes focusing on engineering solutions to improve software delivery and reduce work dissatisfaction, advocating for continuous delivery and feedback to tackle the actual problems in the agile process: "Agile Rehab: Engineering for Improved Delivery."

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

👉 2 Community Tickets at 50 % off: Join the Advanced Product Backlog Management Cohort of April 2-30, 2024, with the code February50 — join for $249.50! 👈

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

• ProdPad: Janna Bastow emphasizes creating a product adoption strategy that transforms potential users into loyal fans by understanding their needs, experimenting with solutions, and continuously engaging with feedback for a truly integrated user experience: "Product Adoption Strategy: How to Get Your Users Craving More."

• Leah Tharin outlines a comprehensive guide for structuring dynamic and efficient product and growth teams, emphasizing the shift from traditional roles to a more integrated, cross-functional approach that aligns with modern market demands and fosters flexibility, focus, and urgency in product development: "Leah's Product & Growth team Guide."

• Ant Murphy explores various product-led growth (PLG) pricing and monetization strategies, emphasizing the importance of adapting pricing models to fit product constraints and user behaviors. Through a dialogue with a founder, Ant challenges limiting beliefs about pricing, suggesting innovative approaches like usage caps and feature-based pricing: "5 Different PLG Pricing and Monetization Strategies."

• Teresa Torres highlights the importance of synthesizing customer interviews into snapshots, experience maps, and opportunity solution trees to drive actionable insights and product improvements: "The Interview Snapshot: How to Synthesize and Share What You Learned from a Single Customer Interview."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• InfoQ: Noah Cantor advises tech teams to achieve flow and quality by focusing on less, removing dependencies, prioritizing work over busyness, and dismantling silos for smoother operations and better customer value: "4 Steps to Achieving Operational Flow and Improving Quality in Tech Teams."

• Medium: Todd Lankford dismantles the myth that deadlines enhance productivity, illustrating how they actually sap motivation and foster a toxic work environment while offering strategies for a more effective, deadline-free approach to product development: "The Inescapable Deadline: 5 Reasons Managers of Product Teams Keep Setting Them."

🎶 Encore

• Harvard Business Review: Cheryl Strauss Einhorn explores navigating professional disagreements with grace, detailing a tool that aids in mindfully executing decisions one disagrees with via reflection and empathy to foster resilience and positive team dynamics: "How to Make Peace with a Company Decision You Don’t Like."

📯 The Scrum Master Salary Report 2024

The Scrum Master Salary Report 2024 is the fifth edition of the industry survey after 2017, 2019, 2022, and 2023. This free report is based on the answers of 1,114 participants globally. If you are considering a career decision this year, maybe whether you should join the industry as a junior Scrum Master, move to a new organization, or go independent, you will find the report's information beneficial.

By the way, the average salary of the participants in the survey is $87,800, with a standard deviation of about $46,400.

Download the Report now: Scrum-Master-Salary-Report-2024-Age-of-Product-com-final.zip. (The ZIP-file includes the PDF of the report as well as high-resolution graphics of the data plots.)

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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 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)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Apr 10-11 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 Apr 23-24 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 May 7 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS; English)

See all upcoming classes here.

📺 Youtube Channel

• Michael Lloyd: Dysfunction Mapping.

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