Food for Agile Thought #471: Disruptive Innovation, Empowered Product Teams, Decoupling OKRs, Leadership Transitions

Welcome to the 471st edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,887 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.

This week, Steven Sinofsky delves into the resilience and boldness required for disruptive innovation, while Robert A. Calkins gleans leadership insights from Star Trek: TNG. Michael Y. Lee tackles the complexities of decentralization, Jason Little and Dawna Jones offer strategies for managing organizational tangles, and Vincent Baas critiques the misuse of popular innovation quotes, advocating for thoughtful, context-aware application.

Next, Christophe Achouiantz reveals how meaningful problems and supportive environments enable true team empowerment, while Mike Fisher underscores the importance of outcomes over outputs for business success. Yue Zhao and Paweł Huryn share Meta’s pre-mortem approach to proactive risk management, and Paul McAvinchey explores retention strategies for sustainable growth and lasting user engagement.

Lastly, Christian Scheb unpacks Elon Musk’s “5 Step Process” for engineering rigor, while Itamar Gilad explores AI’s role in elevating data-driven product decisions. Christina Wodtke champions “decoupled OKRs” to foster team autonomy, and Ant Murphy warns against blind reliance on data. Finally, Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, and Derek Xiao examine generative AI’s 2024 evolution from pilots to enterprise-scale execution.

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🏆 Tip of the Week

Steven Sinofsky reflects on the personal and organizational toll of driving disruptive innovation, emphasizing the resilience, criticism, and bold leadership necessary to challenge entrenched systems and create lasting change: "On the Toll of Being a Disruptor."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

Radical Candor: The author reinvents the wheel with ‘Radical Candor,’ presenting basic Agile principles like openness and feedback as groundbreaking innovations. Spoiler: Scrum and Agile already emphasize transparency, respect, and continuous improvement—no rebranding required: "Radical Candor In Agile Methodologies."

➿ Agile & Leadership

• Angry Staff Officer: Robert A. Calkins explores leadership transitions through Star Trek: The Next Generation, emphasizing adaptability, empathy, and aligning leadership styles to team needs for successful command changes: "‘Get it Done:’ Adjusting to Transitions in Leadership Aboard the USS Enterprise."

• INSEAD Knowledge: Michael Y. Lee explores the challenges of dismantling hierarchies, emphasizing that successful decentralization requires ongoing efforts like bounding and grounding authority to sustain new power dynamics and foster collaboration: "How to Dismantle Hierarchies in Teams."

• 📺 Jason Little and Dawna Jones discuss tackling organizational complexity in That Change Show. They offer actionable strategies, systems thinking insights, and real-world examples to help leaders untangle challenges and drive meaningful change: "How to Un-tangle the Organizational Hairball."

• Medium: Vincent Baas critiques misused innovation quotes, urging deeper understanding and proper context. He highlights the balance between data, gut feelings, flexibility, and customer listening and warns against mindlessly following oversimplified, misattributed wisdom: "Death by a thousand management quotes."

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🎯 Product

• Crisp: Christophe Achouiantz explores why many “empowered” teams are actually stuck implementing pre-defined solutions and shares how giving teams meaningful problems and the right environment unlocks true empowerment: "Why your teams aren’t really empowered (and how to fix It)."

• Mike Fisher highlights the critical distinction between outputs and outcomes, urging businesses to prioritize delivering meaningful impact over simply producing more, with actionable strategies to foster outcome-driven success: "Output vs. Outcomes."

• Yue Zhao and Pawel Huryn highlight how Meta and Instagram use pre-mortems to identify potential project risks, fostering open dialogue, collaboration, and proactive problem-solving to enhance product launch success: "How Meta and Instagram Use Pre-Mortems to Avoid Post-Mortems."

• Mind The Product: Paul McAvinchey emphasizes the critical role of customer retention in sustainable growth, offering data-driven strategies, psychological insights, and product-led tactics to create lasting value and boost long-term user engagement: "Deep Dive: Creating Effective Retention Strategies."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Christian Scheb analyzes Elon Musk’s “5 Step Process,” highlighting its iterative engineering: question requirements, eliminate unnecessary parts, avoid optimizing non-essentials, prioritize cycle time, and automate last. Musk emphasizes manufacturing over design as the actual challenge: "Elon Musk’s Engineering Principles – The 5-Step Process."

• Itamar Gilad delves into the evolution of data proficiency, emphasizing deliberate data use, evidence-guided practices, and AI's potential to drive more competent, more impactful product decisions: "4 Levels of Data Proficiency."

• Christina Wodtke critiques traditional OKR alignment processes, advocating for “decoupled OKRs” where leadership sets a clear direction, teams define their own goals, and trust replaces bureaucratic approvals: "Decoupling OKRs: It’s Time to Let Go."

• Ant Murphy argues for being data-informed over data-driven, emphasizing critical thinking, bias awareness, and multiple perspectives to enhance decision-making quality and avoid blind reliance on data: "Data-Informed, NOT Data-Driven."

🎶 Encore

• Menlo Ventures: Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, and Derek Xiao highlight generative AI’s 2024 leap from experimentation to execution, emphasizing its transformative potential, evolving use cases, and critical challenges enterprises face in implementation: "2024: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise."

📯 The Inverted MoSCoW Framework: Stop Building What You Do Not Need

The inverted MoSCoW framework reverses traditional prioritization, focusing on what a product team won’t build rather than what it will. Deliberately excluding features helps teams streamline development, avoid scope creep, and maximize focus on what truly matters.

While it aligns with Agile principles of simplicity and efficiency, it also requires careful implementation to avoid rigidity, misalignment, or stifling innovation. Used thoughtfully, it’s a powerful tool for managing product scope and driving strategic clarity.

Learn more: The Inverted MoSCoW Framework: Stop Building What You Do Not Need.

📅 Training Classes & Cohorts, Courses, Meetups & Events

Upcoming events:

• 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 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)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Jan 27 — Online Class Release: Align, Discover, Deliver — The Advanced Product Backlog Management Course
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Jan 28-31 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Feb 4-6, 2025 — Live Virtual Open Space: Hands-on Agile 2025: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility
• 🖥 🇬🇧 Mar 6-Apr 3 — Live Virtual Cohort: Align, Discover, Deliver: The Product Backlog Management Cohort Class (English)

See all upcoming classes here.

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