Food for Agile Thought #436: State of Agile 2024, Amazon Product Model, Innovation and Disaster

Welcome to the 436th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,352 peers.

This week, we dive into pivotal insights on Agile’s current landscape and organizational impacts. The 17th State of Agile Report, also discussed by Joyce Tompsett and Shane Hastie, uncovers the evolving challenges and adaptations within Agile practices, highlighting a trend towards hybrid methodologies and the crucial alignment of Agile with business outcomes. Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson’s conversation with Ron Westrum sheds light on organizational culture, using insights from NASA and Boeing. Ben Hartshorne shares Honeycomb’s journey, illustrating the strategic incorporation of technical debt resolution to foster business growth. Lastly, Ben Werdmuller reflects on the evolution of web development, emphasizing the importance of purpose, teamwork, and a culture promoting innovation and inclusivity.

Then, Marty Cagan and Richard Russell delve into Amazon’s customer-focused approach through Prime, showcasing how to fuel technological advancements and long-term value. Leah Tharin discusses the realities versus the idealistic expectations in product management. At the same time, Geoff Watts addresses the challenge of people-pleasing in leadership, presenting techniques for maintaining project integrity while fostering positive relationships. Lastly, Petra Wille emphasizes the critical role of saying “no” in product management, proposing strategies to prioritize and encourage innovation within resource constraints.

Lastly, Andy Walker critiques traditional productivity metrics, advocating for a focus on team dynamics and best practices to enhance development. Willem-Jan Ageling explores the benefits and strategies of dynamic reteaming in product development, and Corinna Baldauf shares insights on using Open Space sessions for effective company-wide retrospectives. Also, we explore how Scrum teams can lose stakeholder support. Finally, David Luan discusses leading Adept in developing practical AGI, reflecting on missed opportunities with GPT-3 at Google.

🎙 Thomas Cagley interviewed me: It’s All About The People.

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👉 There is a Community Ticket at € 649.50 off: Join the Advanced Professional Scrum Master Class of April 23-24, 2024, with the code March50 👈.

🎓 Launch on May 30, 2024: Learn How to Master the Most Important Artifact in the Advanced Product Backlog Management Course!

👉 Please note:

• The course includes membership in a new community of agile professionals.
• The course will only be available until June 6, 2024, for sign-up!

🏆 Tip of the Week

📖 Digital.ai: The 17th State of Agile Report reveals a critical moment for Agile, facing challenges adapting to current shifts like AI, developer burnout, and hybrid work environments. While small organizations praise Agile’s benefits, larger companies express dissatisfaction, leaning towards hybrid frameworks combining Agile with other methods. Leadership in Agile transformation primarily comes from business leaders and executives, with many organizations adopting a mixed approach to software development strategies: "17th State of Agile Report."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

We are lemon-free this week.

➿ Agile & Scrum

• 🎙 Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson discuss how organizational culture impacts innovation and disasters with Ron Westrum. They explore generative, bureaucratic, and pathological cultures, using NASA and Boeing as examples, emphasizing leadership integrity and the role of technical maestros in fostering an environment where information flows freely, and innovation thrives: "Innovation and disaster with Ron Westrum."

• InfoQ: Ben Hartshorne advocates aligning technical debt resolution with business goals to prioritize it on roadmaps, using Honeycomb’s growth and scaling challenges as examples to enhance business efficiency and growth: "How to Get Tech-Debt on the Roadmap."

• 🎙 InfoQ: Joyce Tompsett and Shane Hastie discuss the 17th State of Agile report, which highlights the disconnect between Agile practitioners and business perspectives, the trend towards hybrid methodologies, the emphasis on business outcomes, and the broad adoption of Agile practices across various organizational domains: "The State of Agile in 2024."

• Ben Werdmuller reflects on over two decades in web development, emphasizing the shift from ‘what’ and ‘how’ to build to focus on organizational purpose, teamwork, and navigating technology trends. They advocate for a culture of innovation, inclusion, and servant leadership to empower teams for creative problem-solving: "Building engineering."

🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — May 7, 2024

The Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS) training by Berlin Product People is a 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 a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 CEST.

Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — May 7, 2024.

Customer review: “Great experience – “You reap what you saw.” What I really liked about it was the constant usage of facilitation techniques & Liberating Structures to engage all participants & harness the collective knowledge while reaching the goal of the exercises during the workshop. Therefore, my experience was great because I could really leave with some insights from the whole group that I could apply in my daily work starting from the next day. “You reap what you saw” and in this case, it was the collective intelligence of everyone in the training class.” (Link.)

🎯 Product

• Silicon Valley Product Group: Marty Cagan and Richard Russell detail Amazon’s approach with Prime, highlighting a focus on customer-centric innovation and agile development. They illustrate how strategic experimentation and strong leadership drive Amazon’s ability to harness technology for improved service, showcasing Prime as a testament to its commitment to long-term value and impactful outcomes: "The Product Model at Amazon."

• Leah Tharin highlights the gap between the idealistic expectations for product management and the realities faced by product managers, emphasizing the need for empathy, empowerment, and addressing organizational challenges to align aspirations with practical outcomes: "Why Product Managers hate their jobs..."

• Geoff Watts explores the struggle with people-pleasing, risking project integrity. It advocates for balanced “people-pleasing” with strategies like boundary setting, value clarification, assertiveness, and self-care to ensure leadership effectiveness: "The People Pleasing Product Leader"

• Petra Wille underscores the importance of saying “no” in product management, offering strategies for balancing resources and aligning with strategy. She advocates for nuanced responses, using data and focusing on customer-centric decisions to navigate constraints and encourage innovation: "The Art of Saying No, Product Leadership Edition."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Better Programming: Andy Walker argues against measuring software engineer productivity through metrics alone, advocating instead for fostering team dynamics, educating on best practices like DORA and SPACE, and empowering teams to share progress and context, thus enhancing overall software development effectiveness: "No, you shouldn’t measure software engineers — but you should help them adopt best practices."

• LogRocket: Willem-Jan Ageling, inspired by Heidi Helfand, highlights the inevitability and benefits of dynamic reteaming in product development. He discusses strategies for managing team changes and embracing team evolution as an opportunity: "An introduction to dynamic reteaming."

• Corinna Baldauf reflects on discovering that Open Space sessions functioned as effective company-wide Retrospectives without the traditional structure. This format encouraged diverse participation and problem-solving, providing a platform for addressing issues beyond the scope of team-level Retrospectives: "Organization-wide retrospectives? Open Space!"

🎶 Encore

• 🎙 Latent Space Podcast: David Luan, ex-OpenAI and Google, now leads Adept in advancing AGI with multimodal agents that perform diverse computer tasks, emphasizing enterprise applications and high reliability. He explores Google’s missed opportunity with GPT-3 and Adept’s strategic focus on practical AGI development: "Why Google failed to make GPT-3 + why Multimodal Agents are the path to AGI — with David Luan of Adept."

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 May 7 — Live Virtual Meetup: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz (English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 May 14-15 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 May 28-29 — Live Virtual Class: Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Jun 25-26 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)

See all upcoming classes here.

📺 Youtube Channel

• Johanna Rothman: Tackling Fake Agility.

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