Food for Agile Thought #471: Disruptive Innovation, Empowered Product Teams, Decoupling OKRs, Leadership Transitions
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!
Hello everyone!
Welcome to the 471st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,887 peers.
This week, Steven Sinofsky delves into the resilience and boldness required for disruptive innovation, while Robert A. Calkins gleans leadership insights from Star Trek: TNG. Michael Y. Lee tackles the complexities of decentralization, Jason Little and Dawna Jones offer strategies for managing organizational tangles, and Vincent Baas critiques the misuse of popular innovation quotes, advocating for thoughtful, context-aware application.
Next, Christophe Achouiantz reveals how meaningful problems and supportive environments enable true team empowerment, while Mike Fisher underscores the importance of outcomes over outputs for business success. Yue Zhao and Paweł Huryn share Meta’s pre-mortem approach to proactive risk management, and Paul McAvinchey explores retention strategies for sustainable growth and lasting user engagement.
Also, Christian Scheb unpacks Elon Musk’s “5 Step Process” for engineering rigor, while Itamar Gilad explores AI’s role in elevating data-driven product decisions. Christina Wodtke champions “decoupled OKRs” to foster team autonomy, and Ant Murphy warns against blind reliance on data. Finally, Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, and Derek Xiao examine generative AI’s 2024 evolution from pilots to enterprise-scale execution.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Disruptive Innovation
Steven Sinofsky: On the Toll of Being a Disruptor
Steven Sinofsky reflects on the personal and organizational toll of driving disruptive innovation, emphasizing the resilience, criticism, and bold leadership necessary to challenge entrenched systems and create lasting change.
Source: On the Toll of Being a Disruptor
Author: Steven Sinofsky
🍋 Lemon of the Week
(via Radical Candor): Radical Candor In Agile Methodologies
The author reinvents the wheel with Radical Candor, presenting basic Agile principles like openness and feedback as groundbreaking innovations. Spoiler: Scrum and Agile already emphasize transparency, respect, and continuous improvement — no rebranding required.
➿ Agile & Leadership
Angry Staff Officer: ‘Get it Done:’ Adjusting to Transitions in Leadership Aboard the USS Enterprise
Robert A. Calkins explores leadership transitions through Star Trek: The Next Generation, emphasizing adaptability, empathy, and aligning leadership styles to team needs for successful command changes.
Author: Robert A. Calkins
(via INSEAD Knowledge): How to Dismantle Hierarchies in Teams
Michael Y. Lee explores the challenges of dismantling hierarchies, emphasizing that successful decentralization requires ongoing efforts like bounding and grounding authority to sustain new power dynamics and foster collaboration.
📺 Jason Little: How to Un-tangle the Organizational Hairball
Jason Little and Dawna Jones discuss tackling organizational complexity in That Change Show. They offer actionable strategies, systems thinking insights, and real-world examples to help leaders untangle challenges and drive meaningful change.
Author: Jason Little
Vincent Baas (via Medium): Death by a thousand management quotes
Vincent Baas critiques misused innovation quotes, urging deeper understanding and proper context. He highlights the balance between data, gut feelings, flexibility, and customer listening and warns against mindlessly following oversimplified, misattributed wisdom.
Author: Vincent Baas
🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — December 18–19, 2024
Discover Scrum’s four success principles in this official Scrum.org Advanced Scrum Master training class, which includes the industry-recognized PSM II certification. The PSM II training class is designed as a live virtual class and will be in English.
Enjoy the benefits of a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00–17:30 CET.
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — December 18–19, 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.)
🎯 Product
(via Crisp): Why your teams aren’t really empowered (and how to fix It)
Christophe Achouiantz explores why many “empowered” teams are actually stuck implementing pre-defined solutions and shares how giving teams meaningful problems and the right environment unlocks true empowerment.
Mike Fisher: Output vs. Outcomes
Mike Fisher highlights the critical distinction between outputs and outcomes, urging businesses to prioritize delivering meaningful impact over simply producing more, with actionable strategies to foster outcome-driven success.
Source: Output vs. Outcomes
Author: Mike Fisher
Pawel Huryn: How Meta and Instagram Use Pre-Mortems to Avoid Post-Mortems
Recommended by LinkedIn
Yue Zhao and Paweł Huryn highlight how Meta and Instagram use pre-mortems to identify potential project risks, fostering open dialogue, collaboration, and proactive problem-solving to enhance product launch success.
Author: Pawel Huryn
Paul McAvinchey (via Mind The Product): Deep Dive: Creating Effective Retention Strategies
Paul McAvinchey emphasizes the critical role of customer retention in sustainable growth, offering data-driven strategies, psychological insights, and product-led tactics to create lasting value and boost long-term user engagement.
Author: Paul McAvinchey
📯 The Inverted MoSCoW Framework: Stop Building What You Do Not Need
The inverted MoSCoW framework reverses traditional prioritization, focusing on what a product team won’t build rather than what it will. Deliberately excluding features helps teams streamline development, avoid scope creep, and maximize focus on what truly matters.
While it aligns with Agile principles of simplicity and efficiency, it also requires careful implementation to avoid rigidity, misalignment, or stifling innovation. Used thoughtfully, it’s a powerful tool for managing product scope and driving strategic clarity.
Read on and learn how to make the inverted MoSCoW framework work for your team.
📅 Hands-on Agile 2025 Is Here — Join 500-plus Peers: 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! 👈
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🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
Christian Scheb: Elon Musk’s Engineering Principles — The 5-Step Process
Elon Musk’s “5 Step Process” highlights iterative engineering: question requirements, eliminate unnecessary parts, avoid optimizing non-essentials, prioritize cycle time, and automate last. Musk emphasizes manufacturing over design as the actual challenge.
Author: Christian Scheb
Itamar Gilad: 4 Levels of Data Proficiency
Itamar Gilad delves into the evolution of data proficiency, emphasizing deliberate data use, evidence-guided practices, and AI’s potential to drive more competent, more impactful product decisions.
Source: 4 Levels of Data Proficiency
Author: Itamar Gilad
Christina Wodtke: Decoupling OKRs: It’s Time to Let Go
Christina Wodtke critiques traditional OKR alignment processes, advocating for “decoupled OKRs” where leadership sets a clear direction, teams define their own goals, and trust replaces bureaucratic approvals.
Author: Christina Wodtke
Ant Murphy: Data-Informed, NOT Data-Driven
Ant Murphy argues for being data-informed over data-driven, emphasizing critical thinking, bias awareness, and multiple perspectives to enhance decision-making quality and avoid blind reliance on data.
Source: Data-Informed, NOT Data-Driven
Author: Ant Murphy
🎶 Encore
(via Menlo Ventures): 2024: The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise
Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, and Derek Xiao highlight generative AI’s 2024 leap from experimentation to execution, emphasizing its transformative potential, evolving use cases, and critical challenges enterprises face in implementation.
📅 Training Classes, Meetups & Events 2024
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