Food for Agile Thought #447: Effective Product Teams, Coaching Mastery, Fixing the Double Diamond, Athletic Agile

TL; DR: Effective Product Teams, Coaching Mastery — Food for Agile Thought #447

Welcome to the 447th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,561 peers. This week, John Cutler explores how effective product teams prioritize customer interactions, data-driven decisions, and collaboration over estimations and internal requests. Shreyas Doshi clarifies that mastery-level coaching focuses on self-awareness and transformative leadership, and Sjoerd Nijland shares strategies for transforming teams through self-management and accountability. Also, Francis Laleman examines the crucial Scrum values that build trust and support empirical pillars, and Ari Tikka emphasizes creating a culture of Trust, Care, and Love for team success and psychological safety in diverse environments.

Next, Arne Kittler underscores the necessity of clarity for product managers, offering practical steps for vision, strategy, and priority alignment. At the same time, Lenny Rachitsky presents 27 examples of using the AI-powered search engine Perplexity to enhance growth strategies and market research, and Roman Pichler details a four-step process for adopting outcome-based product roadmaps. Moreover, Janna Bastow highlights the importance of feedback analysis and AI tools for transforming user interactions into strategic insights.

Lastly, Paweł Huryn critiques the Double Diamond of Design Thinking, suggesting a more flexible, iterative approach that separates discovery from delivery. Ivar Jacobson explores the evolution of use cases in Agile practices, emphasizing their complementarity with user stories, and Emily Webber introduces a framework for maintaining team memory and fostering connections in hybrid organizations through intentional communication. Finally, Gareth Edwards chronicles Don Estridge’s transformative journey in building the IBM PC, showcasing his rebellious approach that defied corporate norms.

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This week, the most popular discussion on LinkedIn was: Make Your #Stakeholders a Part of the Team w/ #MetaRetrospective!

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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Effective Product Teams

John Cutler: Where More Effective Product Teams Spend More (and Less) Time

John Cutler explores how effective product teams optimize their time, emphasizing direct customer interactions, data-driven decision-making, and internal collaboration while reducing focus on estimations, internal feature requests, and dependency management.

🍋 Lemon of the Week

We are Lemon-free this week.

➿ Agile & Scrum

Shreyas Doshi (via YouTube): 📺 How to Get to Coaching Mastery — a 16 minute masterclass with principles & examples

Shreyas Doshi discusses the misconception that coaching is merely about giving instructions, feedback, or selflessly aiding others. Mastery-level coaching focuses on helping individuals understand themselves, using observations and questions to foster self-awareness and transformative leadership.

Sjoerd Nijland (via Medium): From Whimsical to Athletic Agile.

Sjoerd Nijland discusses transforming teams from “whimsical” to “athletic” Agile by fostering self-management, accountability, and a coaching mentality rather than relying on maturity models that treat professionals like children.

(via Medium): About the Scrum Values. (like five jars watering a garden)

Francis Laleman examines the five Scrum values—commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage—highlighting their essential role in fostering trust and supporting Scrum’s empirical pillars.

(via Gosei): Trust, Care, and Love

Ari Tikka emphasizes building a culture of Trust, Care, and Love in teams, highlighting essential patterns and effective leadership to foster psychological safety, collaboration, and success in remote and co-located environments.

🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — June 25, 2024

The Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS) training by Berlin Product People is a guaranteed one-day official Scrum.org class for advanced Scrum practitioners and agile coaches, including the industry-acknowledged PSFS certification. This PSFS training class is in English. 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 CEST.

Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class w/ PSFS Certificate — June 25, 2024.

Customer Voice: “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.” (Source.)

👉 From time to time, we can offer last-minute seats for training classes at cost to individuals who do not have access to a corporate training budget. If you would like to be notified about these opportunities, please register here.

🎯 Product

Arne Kittler: Clarity for Product Managers: Part 1, Directional Clarity

Arne Kittler emphasizes the importance of clarity for product managers, discussing directional clarity and providing practical steps to ensure clear vision, strategy, and priorities in collaborative work.

Lenny Rachitsky: How to use Perplexity in your PM work

Lenny Rachitsky shares 27 examples of how product managers use the AI-powered search engine Perplexity to craft growth strategies, conduct market research, and learn best practices.

Janna Bastow (via ProdPad): Feedback Analysis: How to Extract Insights to Fuel Your Product Strategy

Janna Bastow discusses how effective feedback analysis can transform user interactions into valuable insights for improving product strategy, emphasizing AI tools for faster, more effective data interpretation.

Roman Pichler: How to Get Started with Outcome-Based Product Roadmaps

Roman Pichler outlines a four-step process for transitioning to outcome-based product roadmaps. This process focuses on setting measurable goals, aligning features to outcomes, reviewing progress, and building a comprehensive roadmap.

📯 The Meta-Retrospective — Check Out the Free Miroverse Template

The Meta-Retrospective is an excellent exercise to foster collaboration within the extended team, create a shared understanding of the big picture, and immediately create valuable action items. It comprises team members of one or several product teams—or a representative from those—and stakeholders. Participants from the stakeholder side are people from the business as well as customers. Meta-Retrospectives are useful both as a regular event, say once a quarter, or after achieving a particular milestone, for example, a specific release of the product.

Read more on how to organize such a Meta-Retrospective and do not forget to check out the free Miro Meta-Retrospective template.

Learn more: The Meta-Retrospective — Check Out the Free Miroverse Template.

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

Pawel Huryn: How to Fix the Double Diamond of Design Thinking?

Paweł Huryn critiques the Double Diamond of Design Thinking, advocating for a more iterative, flexible approach that separates product discovery from delivery and ensures validated ideas before development.

Emily Webber: A framework for thinking about team memory, joining up and serendipity in hybrid organisations

Emily Webber presents a framework for maintaining team memory, fostering connections, and creating serendipitous opportunities in hybrid organizations, emphasizing intentional communication and inclusive information-sharing practices.

Ivar Jacobson (via InfoQ): 🎙 The Evolution of Use Cases in Modern Software Engineering

Ivar Jacobson discusses the evolution of use cases in modern software engineering, highlighting their role in Agile practices and iterative development and how they complement user stories by addressing different levels of granularity.

🎶 Encore

(via Every): The Misfit Who Built the IBM PC

Gareth Edwards chronicles Don Estridge’s journey in building the IBM PC, highlighting his rebellious approach, which defied IBM’s rules. He ultimately transformed personal computing but faced corporate backlash.

See all upcoming classes here.

You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.

📺 Join 5,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube

Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning, for example, about effective Product Teams:

Hands-on Agile 61: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz.

Hands-on Agile 59: Tackling Fake Agility with Johanna Rothman.

Hands-on Agile 57: Humble Planning with Maarten Dalmijn.

Hands-on Agile 54: Overcoming Common Product Backlog Management Traps with David Pereira.

Hands-on Agile 53: An Agile Coaches Guide to Storytelling with Bob Galen.

Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.

✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn About Effective Product Teams — Join the 19,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community

I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.

If you like to join 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.

Help your team to learn about avoiding Scrum’s Decline by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:

🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #446: Scrum’s Decline, Product Transformation Failure, Product Trios, CapEx and OpEx and Agile.

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