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Agile Leadership: Trust vs. Control – Scrum Inc

By jef in Product Management December 14, 2016

I came across this simple visual example of a complex adaptive system, a scrum, on Scrum Inc’s blog and wanted to share it you. Follow the link at the bottom to read the whole post.

Exerpt: I Listened to Spotify enterprise coach and Agile thought leader Henrik Knieberg’s keynote and loved his analogy on Trust vs. Control. He uses the concept of traffic regulation, specifically a traffic circle vs. an intersection controlled by a stop light.

Trust leads to control. It doesn’t work the other way, controlling behavior results in a lack of trust and trust is the essence of Agile leadership.

Source: Agile Leadership: Trust vs. Control – Scrum Inc

A Transition to Agile

By jef in Product Management December 13, 2016

Over the next several posts I will begin to write about the transition to agile, written from the guiding position of a “scrum master”. Since this group is not strictly a team of only software developers and the project is not strictly setting out with a goal to write software, the posts will be about the process of how the team is modifying agile to fit the a product development circumstance

Jack be agile

(image: https://jk-jkcontentnet.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Jack-Be-Nimble.jpg)

To align with sprint iterations planned in a span of 2 weeks the blog posts will keep to a pattern of release/iteration planning and demo/acceptance criteria/retrospective. I hope to share insights and best practices that have been discovered during this process so they can be applied to your own agile product management projects.

“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” – Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

And naturally this post about Agile would not be complete without a reference to the original The Agile Manifesto.

Some Agile reading available here:

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Online Agile learning resources here:

https://www.scruminc.com/scrumlab-open/ – free resource that explains the basic framework, roles and key patterns of Scrum

http://www.scrumplop.org/ – Jeff Sutherland, the inventor of Scrum, is a charter member of the Scrum Patterns group. He is the author of most of these Scrum PLoP® patterns — patterns he teaches to get teams off to a good start, and to get great teams to a hyperproductive state

https://help.rallydev.com/release-planning – CA Technologies Agile Central has a lot of great articles and tools for agile teams.

Gifts for the product manager/owner

Planning Poker Cards – Mountain Goat Software offers Planning Poker® cards for your use in estimating.

Mountain Goat Software offers Planning Poker® cards

Hat tip: Good Product Team Bad Product Team

By jef in Product Management, Quote posts November 7, 2016

Pressed from
Posted by marty cagan on June 13, 2014 with a hat tip to Ben Horowitz’s classic Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager

“Good teams obsess over their reference customers. Bad teams obsess over competitors.”

I’ve had the extremely good fortune to be able to work with many of the very best technology product teams in the world. People creating the products you use and love every day. Teams that are literally changing the world.

I’ve also been brought in to try to help with companies that are not doing so well. Startups racing to get some traction before the money runs out. Larger companies struggling to replicate their early innovation. Teams failing to continuously add value to their business. Leaders frustrated with how long it takes to go from idea to reality. Engineers exasperated with their product owners.