Food for Agile Thought #437: Food for Agile Thought #437: Dunbar’s Number & Team Building, Discovery Challenges, Job Stories vs. User Stories

Welcome to the 437th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,378 peers.

This week, Patrick O’Shaughnessy interviews Robin Dunbar on Dunbar’s Number, revealing insights into human connections and their relevance in organizational structures. Jim Doran links Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle with Agile, highlighting the balance between focus and speed, alongside the importance of collaboration between Product Managers and Technical Leads. Eric Barker offers strategies to enhance team performance, including keeping teams small and fostering mutual respect. Jutta Eckstein, Susan McIntosh, Craig Smith, Ben Linders, Rafiq Gemmail, and Shane Hastie discuss the latest tech industry trends, focusing on remote innovation, AI, inclusivity, and sustainability. Also, Derk-Jan de Grood tackles five dependencies that slow down agile teams and provides solutions to improve efficiency and delivery.

Then, Debbie Levitt criticizes feature-first mindsets, urging a shift to user-centered product development. Teresa Torres highlights the effectiveness of story-based interviews in grasping actual user needs, and Marcus Castenfors discusses overcoming “Discovery Illness” by refining product discovery processes. Moreover, Ant Murphy shares strategies for streamlining product backlogs to focus on impactful outcomes.

Lastly, Jim Morris critiques the integration of OKRs with conventional processes, advocating for an analytics-first mindset. Avi Siegel distinguishes between job stories and user stories, underlining their collective importance. Another piece dissects common mistakes in user journey mapping, advocating for SMART goals and ongoing updates. Finally, we delve into the evolution of prototyping, from basic sketches to advanced simulations, highlighting their role in refining design and development stages.

📺 YvesHanoulle: The Advantages of Reinventing the Wheel with Stefan Wolpers.

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

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• The course will only be available until June 6, 2024, for sign-up!

🏆 Tip of the Week

🎙 Colossus: In this interview with Robin Dunbar, Patrick O’Shaughnessy explores Dunbar’s research journey to discovering Dunbar’s Number, illustrating its profound impact on understanding human connections, social circle layering, and its implications for organizational structures and personal well-being. Dunbar shares insights into homophily’s role in forming friendships and addresses modern challenges like technology’s impact on social interaction and the rising trend of loneliness: "Robin Dunbar - Optimizing Human Connection."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

We are lemon-free this week.

➿ Agile & Scrum

• Medium: Jim Doran connects Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to Agile software development, emphasizing the balance between project focus and development speed and the critical synergy between Product Managers and Technical Leads: "How Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Relates to Building Software."

• To enhance team performance, Eric Barker advises questioning team necessity, keeping teams small, selecting the right members, ensuring mutual respect, including a constructive critic, and practicing supportive leadership emphasizing impact and progress: "4 Secrets Of High-Performing Teams."

• 🎙 InfoQ: Jutta Eckstein, Susan McIntosh, Craig Smith, Ben Linders, Rafiq Gemmail, and Shane Hastie discuss 2024’s tech industry trends. They emphasize innovation in remote work, AI’s support role, inclusivity, the need for sustainability in development, and practices for reducing carbon footprint and e-waste in software projects: "InfoQ Culture & Methods Trends in 2024."

• AgileConnection: Derk-Jan de Grood discusses five dependencies—chain, stack, shared people, resources, and codebase—slowing agile teams. He suggests strategies like defining roles, enhancing collaboration, and adopting CI/CD to mitigate their effects and improve delivery: "5 Types of Dependencies Slowing You Down (and How to Fix Them)."

🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 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

• Medium: Debbie Levitt critiques the pitfalls of prioritizing product features over genuine user needs. She advocates for a “product last” process that starts with understanding user tasks, experiences, and pain points and ends with creating valuable, user-focused products: "Shift From ‘Product First’ to ‘Product Last’."

• Teresa Torres advocates for story-based customer interviews, emphasizing their role in uncovering genuine user needs and behaviors over hypothetical scenarios that might lead in the wrong direction: "Story-Based Customer Interviews Uncover Much-Needed Context."

• Crisp: Marcus Castenfors identifies “Discovery Illness” in product discovery and suggests solutions like focused collaboration, stakeholder management, and scope limitation to avoid inertia and enhance solution development efficiency: "The Discovery Illness."

• Ant Murphy advises shortening product backlogs by focusing on measurable outcomes, having a clear strategy, and breaking down larger goals to align with strategic objectives for efficient prioritization: "Long Backlogs and Unmeasurable Work."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Jim Morris highlights the pitfalls of poorly integrating OKRs with traditional processes. He emphasizes the importance of an analytics-first culture and the active involvement of teams in data analysis to achieve business objectives truly. He proposes practical steps to effectively navigate the complexities of implementing OKRs: "Our Half-Baked Adoption of OKRs."

• Entrepreneur's Handbook: Avi Siegel argues job stories uncover user needs while user stories define solution actions, suggesting both are essential at different product development stages to meet user needs: "Job Stories vs. User Stories: The Misguided Debate."

• UX Planet: The author outlines ten critical errors in user journey mapping, from neglecting clear goals and user research to failing to update maps over time. They emphasize setting SMART objectives, incorporating thorough research, understanding emotional journeys, and regularly revisiting journey maps to reflect evolving user behaviors and market trends: "Top 10 Mistakes When Creating User Journey Maps."

🎶 Encore

• UXPin: The author guides through the evolution of prototyping, from simple sketches to sophisticated interactive simulations, showcasing the power of each fidelity level in enhancing design and development processes: "Examples of Prototypes – From Low-Fidelity to High-Fidelity Prototypes."

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 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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