Food for Agile Thought #463: Product Transformation, The Aha! Framework, PMs & Technical Expertise, Are Scrum Masters Overhead?

TL; DR: Product Transformation — Food for Agile Thought #463

Welcome to the 463rd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,865 peers. This week, Christian Idiodi shares product transformation tactics to empower product managers in a podcast with Aakash Gupta, while Maarten Dalmijn questions the necessity of Scrum Masters in startups. We revisit Agile’s core principles, with John Cutler emphasizing leadership trust and collaboration, Johanna Rothman advocating for autonomy through less micromanagement and Aha! presenting its flexible framework contrasting Scrum, SAFe®, and Kanban’s complexities.

Next, Gojko Adzic highlights how bugs and feature requests reveal product opportunities, while Chris Butler, in conversation with Jason Knight, argues that product managers don’t need technical expertise for effective collaboration. Mike Goitein stresses continuous discovery and empowerment over command-driven management, and Louron Pratt calls for product managers to focus on tracking feature adoption to optimize value.

Lastly, Fred Hebert warns against using incentives in complex situations, urging for systemic understanding over organizational pressure. Mike Cohn discusses the dangers of perfect estimates, offering practical ways to improve accuracy. Andy Sparks emphasizes the benefits of time audits for leaders, while Tanmay Vora highlights how mindful language fosters psychological safety, referencing Tom Geraghty’s “Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety.”

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

👉 Please note:

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: Product Transformation

Aakash Gupta and Christian Idiodi: 🎙 The Tactics of Product Transformation: How to Build a Better Working Environment with Christian Idiodi

In this podcast with Aakash Gupta, SVPG partner Christian Idiodi explains why even successful startups may need product transformation, sharing key tactics to drive change, empower disillusioned PMs, and navigate the limits of transformation.

🍋 Lemon of the Week

Joe Procopio (via Entrepreneur’s Handbook): The Slow, Painful Death Of Agile and Jira

The author boldly declares Agile is dead, blaming it for tech bloat and inefficiency—completely missing that Agile isn’t the problem, but poor execution and leadership are. Tossing out Agile? Sure, let’s throw out common sense while we’re at it.

<!–We are Lemon-free this week.–>

➿ Agile & Leadership

Maarten Dalmijn: Are Scrum Masters Too Much Overhead?

Maarten Dalmijn argues that having a separate Scrum Master can often become unnecessary overhead, especially for startups, advocating for Scrum to remain in the background rather than dominate discussions.

John Cutler: Chat, Breathe, and Reflect

John Cutler emphasizes the need for leaders to reduce information distance, increase exchange frequency, and foster trust, psychological safety, and cognitive flexibility to effectively navigate dynamic, uncertain situations.

Johanna Rothman: How to Create More Autonomy and Finish More Work with Just Enough Delegation

Johanna Rothman explains how reducing micromanagement and delegating problems rather than tasks leads to greater team autonomy, increased collaboration, and better flow metrics, ultimately delivering improved products.

(via Aha! Blog): The Aha! Framework vs. Scrum vs. SAFe® vs. Kanban

Aha! highlights how its development framework blends strategy and flexibility, contrasting it with Scrum, SAFe®, and Kanban, which often introduce unnecessary complexity, lack strategic focus, or create bureaucratic overhead.

🖥 💯 🇬🇧 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

Gojko Adzic: From Bugs to BEAM

Gojko Adzic explores the overlap between bugs and feature requests, suggesting mismatches and exploits as hidden product opportunities to expand a product’s appeal by addressing unmet user expectations and needs.

Jason Knight and Chris Butler: 🎙 Product Managers DON’T Need to be Technical (with Chris Butler, Staff Product Operations Manager @ GitHub)

Jason Knight and Chris Butler discuss Chris’s view that product managers don’t need technical expertise. Chris argues it could even harm their relationship with engineers, promoting better collaboration without a technical focus.

Michael Goitein: Reimagining Product Development from Command to Collaboration

Mike Goitein emphasizes the importance of continuous discovery, empowering teams, and starting from strategy to build successful products, contrasting it with outdated command-and-control management that stifles innovation and collaboration.

(via Mind The Product): Users engage with only 6% of product features: Product benchmark findings

Louron Pratt reveals that only 6.4% of product features drive 80% of user engagement, urging product managers to track feature adoption and focus on simplifying, promoting, and targeting high-value features.

📯 Agile Primitives — Beyond Frameworks

Are we losing sight of what truly matters in Agile? The future isn’t about rigidly adhering to or outright dismissing frameworks like Scrum or SAFe. Instead, it’s about returning to the fundamental principles — the Agile Primitives — that genuinely empower teams to adapt, innovate, and deliver real value. By refocusing on these core elements, organizations can move beyond mere methodological compliance and embrace authentic agility.

Dive in to explore how the Agile community is coming full circle, rediscovering the essence that made Agile transformative in the first place.

Learn more: Agile Primitives — Beyond Frameworks.

📅 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

Fred Hebert: Carrots, sticks, and making things worse

Fred Hebert argues that using incentives in complex situations like incident response often worsens outcomes by adding pressure, obscuring goal conflicts, and eroding trust, urging for deeper systemic understanding instead.

Mike Cohn: 5 Ways to Create Accurate Estimates Agile Teams & Orgs Trust

Mike Cohn explains how pursuing perfect estimates harms teams, encouraging organizations to treat estimates as approximations, not guarantees, and offering five practical ways to improve estimating accuracy and trust.

Andy Sparks: Conducting a Time Audit

Andy Sparks explains how conducting a time audit helps leaders manage their time effectively, delegate tasks, and boost organizational efficiency while encouraging others to do the same for overall improvement.

🎶 Encore

Tanmay Vora: 7 Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety

Tanmay Vora highlights how mindful language fosters psychological safety by contrasting blame versus learning approaches. He recommends Tom Geraghty’s insights on the “Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety” for creating safer work environments.

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 Product Transformation:

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 Product Transformation — 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 #462: Enabling Agility in Large Organizations, Product Team Topologies, Feature Parity, Anatomy of Self-Management.

The post Food for Agile Thought #463: Product Transformation, The Aha! Framework, PMs & Technical Expertise, Are Scrum Masters Overhead? appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.