Food for Agile Thought #472: Team Dynamics Guide, Engineers Fixing Product Management, AI Eats the World, Learning Wardley Mapping

Welcome to the 472nd edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,871 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.

This week, Andy Cleff explores tools for fostering team harmony and growth, while Jeff Sutherland predicts an AI-driven Agile future where adaptability is essential. Maarten Dalmijn challenges Scrum evangelism to promote pragmatic expertise, Pim de Morree spotlights Bayer’s shift to self-management, and we dissect leadership anti-patterns that undermine product team empowerment.

Next, James Hawkins highlights PostHog’s engineer-product manager collaboration model, while Aakash Gupta interviews Thibault Louis-Lucas on breaking product norms for SaaS success. Jonny Longden advocates dynamic resourcing to drive innovation, and Christina Wodtke emphasizes continuous reflection across product lifecycles to balance growth, adaptability, and sustainable success.

Lastly, Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel explore extreme constraints as a driver of innovation, while Will Larson delves into Wardley Mapping for engineering strategy. Ben Popper and Eran Yahav examine AI coding tools’ benefits and risks, Iccha Sethi links engineering metrics to business outcomes, and Benedict Evans presents 2025’s tech trend: “AI Eats the World.”

Could you do me a favor and forward this email to someone who will enjoy it? You’re awesome, thank you! 🙏

👉 Join 350-plus peers and help create the 2025 edition of the Scrum Salary Report — we need another 650 contributors!

🏆 Tip of the Week

Andy Cleff offers tools, patterns, and practices to navigate team dynamics, fostering harmony, productive conflict, and growth while empowering teams to evolve through observation, experimentation, and systemic change: "A Field Guide to Team Dynamics and Conflict."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

The author argues Scrum’s Definition of Done is the villain behind poor quality, ignoring that it’s a collaborative tool, not a scapegoat for broken processes. Go and blame the tool, not lousy leadership! "Scrum’s Definition of Done Is Polishing Plates in a Burning Kitchen."

➿ Agile & Leadership

• Jeff Sutherland predicts a future where Agile, enhanced by AI, becomes indispensable across all industries. Traditional approaches will no longer suffice, and those who fail to adapt will lose their economic agency: "Is Agile Dead? How AI and Extreme Agile Redefine Work."

• Maarten Dalmijn defends criticizing Scrum despite writing a Sprint Goals book, advocating for agnostic expertise over evangelism to foster learning, results, and nuanced application of Agile practices: "‘Why Do You Criticize Scrum, When You Wrote a Whole Book on Sprint Goals?’"

• 📺 Corporate Rebels: Pim de Morree shares a webinar with Bayer leaders discussing their bold transformation of 100,000 employees from traditional hierarchy to self-management, highlighting insights on shared ownership and organizational agility: "How Bayer Is Transitioning 100,000 People to Self-Management."

🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 Align, Discover, Deliver: The Advanced Product Backlog Management Course — Release Date: January 27, 2025

Are you facing problems aligning vision, stakeholders, and your team and delivering real value?

Is your contribution as a product leader questioned?

Then, prepare to transform your career with my comprehensive, self-paced online class. Dive deep into professional Product Backlog management techniques supported by videos, exercises, and an engaging online community.

👉 Please note:

• The course includes membership in my professional students' brand-new Hands-on Agile community.
• The course will only be available for sign-up until February 3, 2025!

🎓 Join the Launch on January 27: Learn How to Master the Most Important Artifact for any Successful Agile Practitioner!

🎯 Product

• PostHog: James Hawkins shares PostHog’s redefined engineer-product manager dynamic, empowering engineers with product ownership, autonomy, and speed while PMs act as strategic enablers, providing context, insights, and accountability loops: "Product Management Is Broken. Engineers Can Fix It."

• 🎙 Aakash Gupta interviews Thibault Louis-Lucas on breaking traditional product rules, rapid validation, monetization as proper validation, building in public, and leveraging influencer partnerships to scale SaaS products to multimillion-dollar success—“Ship first, think later. Tech doesn’t matter. Users don’t have to be happy:” "How Tibo Sold over $10M in SaaS Products by Breaking All the Rules of Traditional Product Building."

• Christina Wodtke emphasizes continuous reflection across the product lifecycle—Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exit—to align products with reality, optimize growth, and balance portfolios for sustainable success and adaptability: "Continuous Reflection: Driving Success Across the Product Lifecycle."

• Jonny Longden argues that traditional fixed teams and rigid roadmaps stifle innovation in product management, advocating for dynamic resourcing, flexible teams, and probabilistic planning to embrace actual experimentation: "Experimental Product Management Demands a New Approach to Resourcing."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• 🎙 Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel discuss how extreme constraints, inspired by Grant Slatton’s article, can drive creative problem-solving and radically different solutions in software development, exploring tools like Toyota Kata and Oblique Strategies: "Gun to Your Head."

• Will Larson reflects on learning Wardley Mapping, exploring its practical applications for engineering strategy, emphasizing iterative mapping, and leveraging tools like Mapkeep to clarify and evolve strategic thinking: "Rough notes on learning Wardley Mapping."

• 🎙 Stack Overflow: Ben Popper and Eran Yahav explore how AI coding tools boost productivity, aid junior developers, and raise concerns about quality, security, and how even great code can create technical debt: "Even High-Quality Code Can Lead to Tech Debt."

• Medium: Iccha Sethi connects engineering metrics like uptime and deployment frequency to business goals like ARR and GRR, highlighting how aligning lagging and leading indicators drives customer retention and revenue growth: "Tying Engineering Metrics to Business Metrics."

🎶 Encore

• Benedict Evans explores macro tech trends in his 2025 presentation, highlighting “AI Eats the World,” delivered as a keynote at the Slush conference in Helsinki: "AI eats the world."

📯 Product Team Empowerment Anti-Patterns

Leadership anti-patterns often undermine product team empowerment — an essential success factor in Marty Cagan’s product operating model. These failures include micromanagement, overly rigid constraints, conflicting stakeholder demands, informal power struggles, and inadequate tools.

Learn more about addressing these challenges by redefining success, aligning incentives, fostering alignment, and balancing autonomy with standardization.

Read more: Product Team Empowerment Anti-Patterns.

📅 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
• 🖥 🇬🇧 Feb 12-13 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master - Advanced Training (PSM II; English)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 Feb 27 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class (PSFS; English)
• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Mar 6-Apr 3 — Live Virtual Cohort: Align, Discover, Deliver: The Product Backlog Management Cohort Class (English)

See all upcoming classes here.

Don’t Miss Out: Join the 20,000-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 worldwide.

If you want to join now, you will need to send your credentials through this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.

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 42,942 peers.

Best,