Food for Agile Thought #462: Enabling Agility in Large Organizations, Product Team Topologies, Feature Parity, Anatomy of Self-Management

TL; DR: Enabling Agility — Food for Agile Thought #462

Welcome to the 462nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,839 peers. This week, Nick van der Meulen explores how enabling agility in large organizations works by empowering teams through four decision rights guardrails. Itamar Gilad examines decision-making challenges, advocating for decentralization and context-sharing, while Petra Wille and Elias Lieberich offer strategies for optimizing team topologies to enhance flow and productivity. Also, Willem-Jan Ageling highlights how organizational culture often undermines the autonomy promised by Agile principles, and Pim de Morree discusses how self-managing organizations, functioning as dynamic networks, drive innovation and adaptability.

Next, Marcus Castenfors warns against giving too much autonomy too soon during product transformations, highlighting the need for clear leadership and team competence. Maarten Dalmijn challenges the traditional view of requirements, emphasizing the need to anchor them in actual needs, and Saeed Khan advises against chasing feature parity with competitors, advocating instead for market-driven, value-differentiated product strategies. Moreover, Afonso Franco calls for viewing cross-functional teams as a unified discipline, focusing on collective jobs-to-be-done to enhance collaboration and reduce siloed thinking.

Lastly, Doc Norton shares his take on Opportunity Solution Trees, emphasizing collaborative problem-solving and iterative experimentation for achieving outcomes. Wes Kao offers practical advice on delivering bad news effectively, focusing on clarity, avoiding blame, and maintaining agency. Additionally, Melissa Perri explores the role of Product Ops, addressing key pillars, scaling, and the skills essential for a CPO, and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, shares insights on his journey from coder to tech leader, discussing cultural contrasts, coding, and retail’s future with VR and AI. Finally, IDEO highlights the potential of integrating AI with Design Thinking to enhance creativity and user-centric innovation.

🎓 October 23, 2024: The Advanced Product Backlog Management Course for Just $99!

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The course includes membership in my former professional students’ brand-new Hands-on Agile community.

The course will only be available for sign-up until October 31, 2024!

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This week, the most popular discussion on LinkedIn was: Scrum Masters, are you working too much?

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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Enabling Agility

Nick van der Meulen (via MIT Sloan Management Review): The Four Guardrails That Enable Agility

Nick van der Meulen discusses how large organizations can achieve agility comparable to startups by empowering teams through four decision rights guardrails: aligning actions with purpose, democratizing access to data, simplifying policies, and providing dynamic resource allocation. These guardrails enable faster decision-making while maintaining strategic alignment and reducing risk.

🍋 Lemon of the Week

We are Lemon-free this week.

➿ Agile & Leadership

Itamar Gilad: A Culture of Good Decision-Making (Part 1)

Itamar Gilad discusses how organizations struggle with decision-making, emphasizing the importance of differentiating decision types, decentralizing decision-making, and sharing context to improve decision speed and quality.

Petra Wille (via Mind The Product): Optimizing teams: A dual perspective on Team Topologies

Petra Wille and Elias Lieberich offer practical insights on implementing team topologies and share strategies for optimizing team structures for flow, alignment, and productivity in rapidly evolving organizations.

Willem-Jan Ageling: Organizational Culture Eats Developer Autonomy For Breakfast

Willem-Jan Ageling explores how organizational culture undermines the autonomy promised by Agile, emphasizing the gap between Agile principles and the reality many developers face in their work environments.

Pim de Morree (via Corporate Rebels): The Anatomy of a Self-Managing Organization: Why Networks Trump Hierarchies

Pim de Morree explores how self-managing organizations outperform traditional hierarchies by functioning as dynamic, interconnected networks. This structure fosters adaptability, innovation, distributed leadership, resilience, and higher employee engagement.

🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — October 15-16, 2024

Discover Scrum’s four success principles in this guaranteed official Scrum.org Advanced Scrum Master training class including the industry-recognized PSM II certification. The PSM II training class is designed as a live virtual class and will be offered in English.

Enjoy the benefits of a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 CEST.

Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — October 15-16, 2024.

Customer Voice: “Dear Stefan, Thanks a lot for two intense and mindblowing days. Your way of teaching suites me perfectly. I must admit that all the positive feedback you have gotten is spot on! I would any time a day recommand your class to a Scrum Master who wants to add a whole new level to his/her scrum game. To all of you reading this. You have to experience Stefans class to understand how good it is.” (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

Marcus Castenfors: Introduction & Anti-pattern #1: ‘Giving too much autonomy, too soon’

Marcus Castenfors explains the anti-pattern of giving too much autonomy too soon during a product transformation, emphasizing the need for leadership to provide clear direction and develop team competence to avoid chaos.

Maarten Dalmijn: WTF is a Requirement?

Maarten Dalmijn challenges the traditional view of requirements, emphasizing the importance of understanding the actual needs behind them and warning against the dangers of unanchored, floating requirements.

Afonso Franco: A different lens of seeing a product team

Afonso Franco advocates viewing cross-functional teams as a discipline, focusing on collective jobs-to-be-done rather than individual roles to foster collaboration, adaptability, and elimination of siloed thinking within product development teams.

Saeed Khan (via Medium): Why Trying to Achieve Feature Parity with Competitors is a Bad Idea

Saeed Khan argues that striving for feature parity with competitors is a losing strategy, urging companies to focus on market needs, differentiate through real value, and avoid reactive product development driven by competitors.

📅 Hands-on Agile 2025 Is Here: From Concept-Based to Context-Based Agility

I am thrilled to announce that Hands-on Agile 2025 is officially on the horizon and will be free to attend from February 4-6, 2025. This time, we will focus on how Agile needs to evolve from concept-based agility to context-based agility.

But before we discuss what that means, let’s take a step back and consider why Hands-on Agile 2025 is going to be a can’t-miss event for everyone in the agile community.

For those unfamiliar, Hands-on Agile isn’t just another conference. It’s an event built around the Barcamp model, meaning it’s a self-organized, community-driven gathering with one goal: Sharing knowledge and experiences.

From February 4 to 6, 2025, we will spend three energizing days engaging in sessions, practicing agile games, sharing war stories, and learning directly from each other. Hands-on Agile is all about creating a space for practitioners, coaches, leaders, and newcomers to connect in a truly hands-on way.

Save Your Seat Now!

There are no tickets; Hands-on Agile 2025 is free.

However, you will need to register nevertheless. Otherwise, you would not receive, for example, the invitation to the HoA2025 community or have access to individual session access credentials:

Please note:

For technical reasons, your sign-up confirmation will be sent from stefan [at] age-of-product.com.
Your registration to Hands-on Agile 2025 will also subscribe you to Stefan’s Food for Agile newsletter, one of the largest independent newsletters on agile practices worldwide.
Your invitation to join the Hands-on Agile 2025 community will be limited to February 28, 2025.

🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring

Melissa Perri: 🎙 Product Ops Guide

Melissa Perri discusses Product Ops with Afonso Franco, its key pillars, misconceptions, and how it supports product teams and leaders. She also covers scaling, measuring success, and the essential skills for a CPO.

Doc Norton: Opportunity Solution Trees

Doc Norton describes the Opportunity Solution Trees as connecting experiments to desired outcomes by identifying problems and solutions, emphasizing collaborative problem-solving and iterative experimentation, and focusing on small, testable steps to validate solutions.

Wes Kao: How to deliver bad news when it’s not your fault

Wes Kao shares tips on delivering bad news when it’s not your fault, emphasizing the importance of avoiding negative language, keeping messages concise, not accepting blame, and reminding others of their agency.

(via IDEO U): The Intersection of Design Thinking and AI: Enhancing Innovation

The author highlights how integrating AI with design thinking enhances creativity and problem-solving. Combining AI’s data-driven insights with human-centered design drives innovation and user-centric solutions.

🎶 Encore

Tyler Cowen and Tobi Lütke: 🎙 Tobi Lütke on Creating Shopify for Americans as a German in Canada

Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, discusses his journey from German coder to tech leader with Tyler Cowen. They explore cultural contrasts, coding insights, and the future of retail through VR and AI.

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 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube

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

Hands-on Agile 62: From Backlog Manager to Product Manager with David Pereira.

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 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 Enabling Agility — Join the 20,000-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 Bringing Problems to Leaders by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:

🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #461: Bringing Problems to Leaders, Backlash for Product Managers, Dangerous Founder Mode, Fueling Product Discovery.

The post Food for Agile Thought #462: Enabling Agility in Large Organizations, Product Team Topologies, Feature Parity, Anatomy of Self-Management appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.