Food for Agile Thought #475: Natural Agility, Fake Product Transformations, AI Product Management, Fail a Lot!

Welcome to the 475th edition of the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter, shared with 42,812 peers. I am Stefan Wolpers, offering hands-on, actionable advice to agile professionals.

This week, Dave Snowden challenges the “Agile Industrial Complex” to move beyond rote behaviors toward fostering natural agility and strategic impact. Charles Lambdin dissects Agile’s waning influence, citing political naïveté and misaligned priorities, while Chris Matts warns of superficial “Product Transformations” in 2025, echoing past Agile missteps. Gene Gendel discusses with Andy Cleff and Jay Hrcsko how HR and finance can either constrain or enable agility. Finally, Gregor Ojstersek and Michał Poczwardowski offer actionable tips for creating meetings engineers won’t hate, emphasizing relevance and purpose.

Next, Aletheia Delivre introduces “Walk the Park” and “Customer Love Sprints,” rituals that help teams tackle UX debt and prioritize customer-focused improvements. John Cutler advocates for nuanced customer segmentation via organizational psychographics, aligning strategy and product with GTM approaches, and Marty Cagan reflects on AI’s evolving role in product management, examining its effects on discovery, creativity, and team satisfaction. Also, Jason Cohen shares actionable strategies for uncovering customer insights before building a product, emphasizing creative outreach and leveraging networks.

Lastly, Nir Eyal reframes failure as a growth opportunity, advocating for resilience through structured reflection and positivity. Benji Weber explores overcoming resistance to Extreme Programming by inviting teams to embrace collaboration and shared ownership. Moreover, Kent Beck contrasts the “Desert” and “Forest” mindsets, showcasing how XP practices lead to near-zero production bugs. Gustavo Razzetti uncovers five hidden team habits that sabotage collaboration, while Van Halen’s “no brown M&Ms” clause offers a metaphor for identifying overlooked details, much like sentinel species signal broader systemic risks.

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🎓 🖥 🇬🇧 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?

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👉 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!

🏆 Tip of the Week

📺 Dave Snowden critiques the “Agile Industrial Complex,” urging a shift from prescribed behaviors to fostering processes and interactions that generate agility, self-organization, and strategic value beyond mere code delivery: "Rewilding Agile — Agile to Agility."

🍋 Lemon of the Week

Medium: The author’s critique of Scrum’s 2020 Guide is a prime lemon of misunderstandings. From calling time-boxing rigid to dismissing cross-functionality as unrealistic, it’s a cocktail of misconceptions. And the irony of labeling Scrum both too rigid and too vague in the same breath? Priceless: "A Good Faith Critique of Scrum Based on its 2020 Guide."

➿ Agile & Leadership

• Charles Lambdin explores why Agile is losing momentum, critiquing its political naïveté, lack of strategic foresight, and organizations’ misaligned priorities favoring control over true agility: "Why Agile Is Losing Steam."

• Chris Matts predicts 2025 will see superficial “Product Transformations” plagued by context-free processes, certification schemes, and costly reorganizations—prioritizing optics over meaningful change, echoing past Agile and DevOps missteps: "2025 Predictions – Fake Product Transformations cross the Chasm."

• 🎙 Agile Uprising: Gene Gendel discusses with Andy Cleff and Jay Hrcsko how HR policies and financial structures can enable or constrain agility, sharing strategies for transforming constraints into enablers of organizational change: "Beyond Agile Theater: Organizational Enablers."

• Gregor Ojstersek and Michał Poczwardowski share practical tips to create effective, engineer-friendly meetings by focusing on purpose and relevance, minimizing disruption, and tailoring interactions to attendees’ needs and preferences: "Why engineers hate meetings and how to fix it."

🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — February 27, 2025

Berlin Product People GmbH’s Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS) training is a guaranteed one-day official Scrum.org class for advanced Scrum practitioners and agile coaches. It includes 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 CET.

Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — February 27, 2025.

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

• UX Collective: Aletheia Delivre shares two impactful rituals—“Walk the Park” and “Customer Love Sprints”—that unite teams to prioritize product quality, address UX debt, and deliver meaningful, customer-focused improvements collaboratively: "Making product quality a team sport."

• John Cutler emphasizes moving beyond simplistic firmographic ICPs to organizational psychographics, advocating for nuanced customer segmentation based on awareness, centralization, change dynamics, and effectiveness to align strategy, product, and GTM approaches: "Beyond Firmographic-Based ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles)."

• Silicon Valley Product Group: Marty Cagan reflects on two years of AI product management, highlighting its nuanced impact on product discovery, creativity, and job satisfaction while urging focus on the evolving questions AI raises for teams: "AI Product Management 2 Years In."

• Jason Cohen: Jason Cohen shares strategies for finding and interviewing potential customers before building a product, emphasizing relationship-building, creative outreach methods, and leveraging networks to validate ideas and uncover insights: "When you have nothing: How to find potential customers to interview."

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

• Nir Eyal emphasizes failure as a natural part of growth, advocating resilience through self-compassion, positivity, and a structured “I failed” process to turn setbacks into progress: "Fail! Fail a Lot! It’s Good for You."

• Benji Weber discusses overcoming resistance to Extreme Programming (XP), emphasizing the importance of inviting teams to take control, addressing misconceptions, and fostering collaboration through coaching, shared experiences, and supportive management practices: "Overcoming Resistance to Extreme Programming."

• Kent Beck reflects on software development’s “Desert” versus “Forest” mindset, explaining how Extreme Programming practices enable teams to achieve near-zero production bugs through collaboration, continuous improvement, and proactive design: "Bugs Optional?"

• Gustavo Razzetti identifies five hidden team habits—overcommitting, silent disagreement, urgency addiction, sugar-coated feedback, and meeting overload—that sabotage collaboration: "Say Goodbye to These Five ‘Harmless’ Team Habits in 2025."

🎶 Encore

• Odd Athenaeum: Van Halen’s “no brown M&Ms” clause, often seen as rock excess, was actually a clever safety check, highlighting overlooked contract details—much like sentinel species signal environmental dangers: "Van Halen and Brown M&Ms."

📅 Training Classes & Cohorts, Courses, Meetups & Events

Upcoming events:

• 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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)
• 🖥 🇩🇪 Mar 11-12 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German)
• 🖥 🇬🇧 Mar 26-27 — Live Virtual Class: Professional Scrum Master - Advanced Training (PSM II; English)

See all upcoming classes here.

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