Food for Agile Thought #440: Brilliant Jerks, Product Operating Model Template, Backlog Organization Patterns

Welcome to the 440th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,461 peers.

This week, Andy Birds emphasizes utilizing a product operating model to enhance ROI and customer outcomes. Brendan Gregg critiques the impact of disruptive “brilliant jerks” in engineering, while John Cutler advocates for engagement over layoffs. Also, Alex Debecker shares Basecamp’s Shape Up methodology, and Murray Robinson discusses the commodification of methodologies.

Then, Itamar Gilad warns about the potential pitfalls of Generative AI in degrading product culture. Roger Martin critiques traditional strategic planning, emphasizing genuine strategic thinking. Moreover, Ant Murphy introduces innovative Product Backlog formats and management techniques, and Teresa Torres and Stephanie Leue discuss transitioning from a feature factory to continuous discovery.

Lastly, Dave Rooney suggests replacing Story Points with simpler metrics, such as counting completed user stories. Nočnica Mellifera warns against misusing DORA metrics as high-stakes personnel tools. Abi Noda and Tim Cochran also promote qualitative metrics for measuring developer productivity. Cameron Presley advocates for blameless postmortems to learn from failures. Finally, Benedict Evans discusses evolving AI use cases, considering its potential to manage complex tasks.

📈 Help design a new class and benefit: What Stands Between You and Advancing Your Career as Product Owner or Product Manager?

📅 Agile Camp Berlin 2024: Please join the survey on whether you would attend ACB 2024 on November 1-2, 2024. #thankyou

📺 David Pereira interviewed me: Overcoming Dangerous Scrum Anti-Patterns with Stefan Wolpers.

🎓 Launch on July 1, 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.
• Become fully reimbursed if you also choose to join the Advanced Product Backlog Management Cohort of June 13 - July 11, 2024, at € 399.
• The course will only be available until July 8, 2024, for sign-up!

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

🏆 Tip of the Week

ThoughtWorks: Andy Birds discusses transforming enterprises into product organizations by adopting a product operating model (POM) that prioritizes data-informed decisions, accelerates delivery, and enhances investment ROI by focusing on customer outcomes: "How to create a product operating model to support product organization transformation."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

We are Lemon-free this week.

➿ Agile & Scrum

• Brendan Gregg discusses the detrimental impact of “brilliant jerks” in engineering, distinguishing between selfless and selfish types and advocating for company policies that do not tolerate such disruptive behaviors: "Brilliant Jerks in Engineering."

• John Cutler reflects on his crisis with continuous improvement in tech, questioning the role of layoffs versus engagement in company transformations and advocating for a return to core principles like Kaizen: "Why Aren't We Talking About Continuous Improvement?"

• Mind The Product: Alex Debecker shares insights from implementing Basecamp’s Shape Up methodology, highlighting its departure from traditional development, which does not involve Sprints or tasks and focuses on unified problem-solving: "7 lessons from trialling Basecamp's 'Shape Up' methodology."

• Referring to an article by John Cutler, Murray Robinson explores the lifecycle of methodologies using Simon Wardley’s concept of commodification, illustrating the evolution from innovative practices to standardized methods across fields like Data, Business Agility, and DevOps: "The Way is Dead. Long live the Way!"

🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Advanced Product Backlog Management Cohort Class of June 13-July 11, 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.

Additional bonuses:

1. You will become a member of an exclusive community of product professionals comprising participants from all my classes since 2019.
2. You will have free access to the corresponding online course; revisit all topics of the cohort at your convenience.

Enjoy the benefits of an immersive cohort class and its community with like-minded agile peers on Juni 13, June 27, and July 11, 2024, from 3-6 pm CEST. The class will be offered in English.

👉 Join now: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Product Backlog Management Class of Juni 13-July 11, 2024.

🎯 Product

• Itamar Gilad examines the transformative impact and potential risks of Generative AI in product development, cautioning against its ability to degrade product culture and generate low-quality products quickly: "What Does Generative AI Mean For Product Development?"

• 📺 YouTube: Roger Martin argues that actual strategy involves stepping out of comfort zones, contrasting with common strategic planning, which often lacks genuine strategic thinking: "A Plan Is Not a Strategy."

• 📺 YouTube: Ant Murphy explores eight Product Backlog formats and advanced management techniques to enhance focus and improve outcomes, offering solutions for those overwhelmed by traditional tools like Jira: "8 Different Ways to Organize your Product Backlog."

• Teresa Torres talks to Stephanie Leue, providing insights into shifting from a feature factory to a continuous discovery approach: "Shifting from a Feature Factory to Continuous Discovery."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Dave Rooney advocates for discarding Story Points in agile processes, emphasizing more straightforward metrics like counting completed user stories to boost productivity and value delivery: "Ultimately, There's No Point!"

• The New Stack: Nočnica Mellifera examines the misuse of DORA metrics, meant to enhance developer enablement but often misinterpreted as high-stakes metrics for staffing decisions, highlighting the need for mindful application beyond mere numbers: "The Wrong Way to Use DORA Metrics."

• Abi Noda and Tim Cochran emphasize qualitative metrics in measuring developer productivity. They argue that data from developers themselves offers a richer, more accurate measure of productivity than traditional system-based metrics. Their approach aims to understand productivity from the developers’ perspective, advocating for a human-centered metric system in organizational assessments: "Measuring Developer Productivity via Humans."

• Cameron Presley emphasizes learning from failures, advocating for postmortems that analyze outages without blaming to prevent recurring issues and continually improve systems: "Learning From Failures: Leveraging Postmortems for Good."

🎶 Encore

• Benedict Evans discusses the evolving use cases for AI like ChatGPT, noting its capabilities and limitations and speculating on its potential to handle complex, multi-step tasks without specialized software for each: "Looking for AI use-cases."

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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 13-Jul 11 — Live Virtual Cohort: Advanced Product Backlog Management Cohort (PBM; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 June 25 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Training (PSFS; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Jul 9-10 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Aug 27-28 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; German)

See all upcoming classes here.

📺 Youtube Channel

• Johanna Rothman: Tackling Fake Agility.

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 would 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 42,461 peers.

Best,