Food for Agile Thought #468: Product Velocity, Lean Product Canvas, Waste in Product Management, Organizational Inertia

Welcome to the 468th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,965 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.

This week, Ned O’Leary advocates streamlined, minimalist product processes, while John Cutler addresses organizational inertia through adaptive structures. Also, Max Levchin shares Affirm’s integrity-driven productivity approach, Maarten Dalmijn analyzes Waternet’s failed SAFe transformation, and Shubham Sharma advocates lean, continuous feedback over traditional Retrospectives.

Next, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden reveal updated Lean Product and Strategy Canvases for holistic product alignment, Aakash Gupta interviews Maria Cuasay on accelerating growth through focused culture and processes, and Paweł Huryn identifies ten productivity drains in product management. Moreover, Alex Debecker highlights scope bloat’s pitfalls.

Lastly, Adam Ard contrasts collaboration styles, stressing individual ownership vs. team-driven consistency to boost productivity. Kyle Crawford advocates for embracing ambiguity in overcoming barriers to social impact, and Manu Kapur emphasizes “productive failure” as a structured growth tool. Finally, Sheril Mathews reinforces that blending psychological safety with high standards creates an optimal “Learning Zone” for high performance.

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🏆 Tip of the Week

SSOReady: Ned O'Leary argues that rapid product development is best achieved by minimizing processes and focusing on essentials. He advocates for “idiot mode” simplicity, skipping elaborate planning, limiting scope, strategically ignoring non-critical details, and keeping teams small to maximize speed and product velocity: "Methodology Is Bullshit: Principles for Product Velocity."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

Medium: The author presents SAFeBut, a twist on ScrumBut, claiming you can maximize SAFe’s impact by clinging to its “Ten Critical Success Factors.” I wonder: if you’re rigidly following a set list of rules in a complex environment, aren’t you missing the entire agile point? "What Is SAFeBut? And How To Avoid It."

➿ Agile & Leadership

• John Cutler discusses the challenge of organizational inertia and its pendulum-like swings. He suggests adopting structures, aligning incentives, and fostering continual sensemaking can help organizations balance independence and coordination, allowing them to respond more nimbly to market shifts and avoid disruptive overhauls: "Surfing Inertia and Pendulum Swings."

• Max Levchin explains Affirm’s “High-Performance Culture” OKR, emphasizing a meritocracy based on integrity, calculated risk-taking, and constructive dissent. His guidelines focus on humility, collaboration, and results-oriented productivity: "To Build a Meritocracy."

• Maarten Dalmijn examines Waternet’s failed transformation, arguing that relying on SAFe, costly rebuilds, and ignoring underlying dysfunctions led to bankruptcy, underscoring that frameworks alone don’t fix foundational organizational issues: "How a Digital Transformation Can Bankrupt Your Company."

• Medium: Shubham Sharma argues traditional Retrospectives are outdated, proposing lean, continuous feedback loops as a more practical alternative for modern, distributed teams. His approach prioritizes real-time reflection over rigid, scheduled meetings to enhance team agility: "Why Traditional Retrospectives Are Redundant."

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🎯 Product

• Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden introduce an updated Lean Product Canvas and a new Lean Strategy Canvas, expanding beyond UX to support entire product teams. These tools encourage cross-functional alignment, integrating OKRs, job-to-be-done language, and strategic clarity, helping teams achieve shared goals and streamline product discovery and delivery: "The Lean Product Canvas."

• 🎙 Aakash Gupta interviews Maria Cuasay about accelerating product growth. They discuss essentials like speed-focused culture, streamlined processes, unique Growth PM skills, and frameworks like Opportunity Solution Trees for customer-focused solutions: "How to Build Things Faster as a Product Team."

• Pawel Huryn outlines ten critical sources of waste in product management, including team topology issues, rigid processes, excessive documentation, meeting overload, and analysis paralysis, while offering actionable strategies to tackle these productivity pitfalls and keep teams motivated: "10 Sources of Waste in Product Management."

• Alex Debecker shares seven warning signs of scope bloat in product management, from overloading requirements to cool-but-needless features, and emphasizes the importance of ruthless prioritization and iterative scoping: "7 signs of scope bloat I no longer ignore."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Adam Ard contrasts two collaboration styles: individual stewardship, which fosters deep expertise through ownership and shared stewardship, which promotes teamwork and consistency. Choosing the right approach enhances productivity and engagement based on team needs: "Programmer Collaboration Styles."

• Stanford Social Innovation: Kyle Crawford argues that embracing ambiguity, rather than rigid strategies, empowers change-makers to overcome entrenched power structures, adapt dynamically, and discover unconventional pathways, ultimately advancing social impact efforts despite challenging odds: "The Strategic Art of Ambiguity (SSIR)."

• Harvard Business Review: Manu Kapur advocates for “productive failure,” where managers design tasks with built-in challenges to foster employee growth. By balancing performance and learning goals, employees explore, fail, and gain insights within a structured, safe environment, ultimately enhancing innovation and resilience: "To Help Your Team Learn, Set Them Up for Productive Failure."

🎶 Encore

• Sheril Mathews argues that psychological safety and high standards are complementary, not contradictory, in creating high-performance environments. Psychological safety fosters risk-taking, accountability, and learning, while high standards drive excellence, creating a “Learning Zone” that balances challenge and support: "Psychological Safety vs. High Standards: A Misunderstood Dynamic."

📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events

Upcoming classes and events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Nov 19 — Live Virtual Meetup: Escape the Feature Frenzy, Build to Sell with Sandrine Olivencia (English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Nov 21 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS II; English)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Dec 4-5 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master Training (PSM I; German)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Dec 10-11 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 Dec 12 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Product Discovery and Validation Training (PPDV; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Dec 18-19 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master - Advanced Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Feb 4-6, 2025 — Live Virtual Open Space: Hands-on Agile 2025: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility

See all upcoming classes here.

📺 Youtube Channel

• Jeremy Willets and Tom Cagley: Mastering Work Intake: The Key to Sustainability and Flow.

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