Food for Agile Thought #386: Scrum Police, Marty Cagan on Transformations, Agile Bureaucracy, Trust In Product Management?
Stefan Wolpers
🚀 I help Product Owners, Product Managers, Scrum Masters & Agile Coaches Grow w/ Classes, Courses, Books & Community. 📖 Author of the ”Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide;” 🏅Trainer at Scrum.org; ⬇️ Book a 1-on-1; talk chances!
TL; DR: Scrum Police, Marty Cagan on Transformations — Food for Agile Thought #386
Welcome to the 386th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 45,734 peers. This week, we applaud Mike Cohn and his fantastic squad from the Scrum Police for battling the countless misadventures of wonky Scrum implementations. Also, Jurriaan Kamer explores six options to “revitalize your agile transformation” while we reflect on the “relationship between organization and self-organization,” as systems self-organize within constraints. Moreover, Shane Snow claims, “despite our natural propensity to trust, a lack of trust is the #1 underlying cause of dysfunction in teams,” and Jason Cohen dives into humanity’s repeated pattern of inability to predict the future and what techniques we have to navigate our volatile world.
Then, Marty Cagan shares his thoughts on common transformation pitfalls, from outsourcing the transformation to McBoston to the widespread desire for a process, and Tim Herbig suggests addressing the analysis-paralysis problem product teams face during product discovery. Additionally, Dave Gray shares several free innovation-related illustrations, from the corporate innovation ecosystem to measuring innovation to plugging into the startup ecosystem.
Finally, we appreciate that Corinna Baldauf turned all 144 Retromat exercises into a giant Miro template and enjoy Nick Brown’s excellent primer on the many problems, issues, and flaws of a favorite concept of many organizations: flow efficiency. Russ Roberts interviews Kevin Kelly about his book ‘Excellent Advice for Living,’ and why Kevin Kelly is not worried about AI, and we close with David Rotman’s belief that LLMs would inevitably cause a revolution by transforming many jobs. Whether that will be beneficial to society is up to us to decide.
📈 Please join the anonymous survey: What Anti-Patterns have you observed that make Jira unbearable?
Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought’s issue 385?
🗞 Shall I notify you about articles like this one? Awesome! You can sign up here for the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and join 45,000-plus subscribers.
🎓 Join Stefan in one of his upcoming Professional Scrum training classes!
📖 Get notified when the Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide book is available!
Join your peers on April 5, 2023: Hands-on Agile 50: The Product Community of Practice w/ Petra Wille.
🏆 The Tip of the Week
📺 Mike Cohn: Scrum Police
Hats off to Mike Cohn and his fantastic squad for battling the countless misadventures of wonky Scrum implementations!
For years, the Scrum Police existed in the shadows, defending the purity of Scrum implementations. As crimes against Scrumanity have increased, we are going public with our efforts.
On our new, official site you can report crimes, view a log of recent convictions, and even confess your own crimes before you are turned in by your teammates.
Source: 📺 Scrum Police
Author: Mike Cohn
🍋 The Lemon of the Week
Reid Manchester (via Mind The Product): Trust? In product management?
Reid Manchester reflects on trust and risk in product management, claiming that building healthy, successful products requires product people to work in a state of low trust.
Author: Reid Manchester
➿ Agile & Scrum
Jurriaan Kamer (via Medium): Don’t Get Stuck in Agile Bureaucracy
Jurriaan Kamer explores six options to “revitalize your agile transformation,” from examining beliefs about people in the workplace, reviewing your current framework and practices to using experimentation to evolve the organization continuously.
Author: Jurriaan Kamer
Chris Corrigan: Holding space for self-organization
Chris Corrigan reflects on the “relationship between organization and self-organization,” as systems self-organize within constraints.
Author: Chris Corrigan
Jason Cohen (via Jason Cohen): Navigating the unpredictability of everything
Jason Cohen dives into humanity’s repeated pattern of inability to predict the future and what techniques we have to navigate our volatile world.
Author: Jason Cohen
Shane Snow: The Counter-Intuitive Truth About Trust In Teamwork
Shane Snow claims, “despite our natural propensity to trust, a lack of trust is the #1 underlying cause of dysfunction in teams.”
Author: Shane Snow
🎓 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class — May 16, 2023
The Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS) training by Berlin Product People is a guaranteedone-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.
Enjoy the benefits of an live-virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00–17:30 o’clock CET.
Learn more: 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills Class — May 16, 2023.
👉 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 like to be notified about these opportunities, please register here.
🎯 Product
Recommended by LinkedIn
📺 Marty Cagan (via Mind The Product): Common transformation pitfalls
In this extensive video, Marty Cagan shares his thoughts on common transformation pitfalls, from outsourcing the transformation to McBoston to the widespread desire for a process.
Author:Marty Cagan
Tim Herbig: From Information to Evidence: How Context Informs Product Discovery Decisions
Tim Herbig suggests addressing the analysis-paralysis problem product teams face during product discovery.
Author: Tim Herbig
Dave Gray: Innovation illustrated
Dave Gray shares several free innovation-related illustrations, from the corporate innovation ecosystem to measuring innovation to plugging into the startup ecosystem.
Source: Innovation illustrated
Author: Dave Gray
📯 Creating a Personal Readme for Scrum Masters with ChatGPT
Providing a personal readme to your new teammates and stakeholders as a Scrum Master is a great way to build trust and rapport while managing expectations at the same time. I do so regularly and having a template for that purpose comes in handy.
Therefore, I thought it also might be an excellent exercise to test ChatGPT on more practical aspects of a Scrum Master’s work. So please follow the complete path to having ChatGPT create a decent personal readme template for Scrum Masters — which took me less than 20 minutes.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
Corinna Baldauf: Retromat Miroboard Mega Template — All About Retrospectives
Corinna Baldauf turned all 144 Retromat exercises into a giant Miro template.
Author: Corinna Baldauf
Nick Brown (via Medium): The many flaws of flow efficiency
Nick Brown shares an excellent primer on the many problems, issues, and flaws of a favorite concept of many organizations.
Author: Nick Brown
🎶 Encore
🎙 Russ Roberts and Kevin Kelly (via Econlib): Kevin Kelly on Advice, AI, and Technology
Russ Roberts interviews Kevin Kelly about his book ‘Excellent Advice for Living,’ and why Kevin Kelly is not worried about AI.
Authors: Russ Roberts and Kevin Kelly
(via MIT Technology Review): ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.
David Rotman believes that LLMs will inevitably cause a revolution by transforming many jobs. Whether that is beneficial to society is up to us to decide.
📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events 2023
Upcoming classes and events:
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
📺 Join 4,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel:
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Join the 12,000-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.
🎓 Do You Want to Read more like this?
Well, then:
Food for Agile Thought 386: Scrum Police, Marty Cagan on Transformations, Agile Bureaucracy, Trust In Product Management? was first published on Age-of-Product.com.
Subscribe to weekly newsletter for articles ✦ Coddiwompler
1ySome nice articles Stefan Wolpers this week.
Possibilitarian.
1yCool!
"The Continuous Improvement Coach" | Keynote Speaker | I help people deliver more value through Training, Coaching & Community. | 56k people learn with me daily. Book a 1:1 to make Continuous Improvement easy.
1yLove Mikes April fools content over the years. Always good for a laugh. I wonder what the rules for a Scrum police stop and search would be?
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Agile 2 Academy; Executive level Agile and DevOps advisor and consultant; Lead author of Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile
1yScrum Police sounds like we all ran away from - like when you call the police for help and they come in and immediately shoot your dog.
Thought Provoker / COO - AI / Edge Computing
1yProblem with Mike Cohn's Scrum Police is that they don't scale ... We need a Scrum@Scale Police!