Agile

You know that moment when you realise that something is not quite right in the team? Often you think you know straight away what needs improvement, but for some reason the team can’t see what you’re seeing. What’s wrong with them? It’s so obvious! There’s nothing wrong with them. There’s a saying from the world of Read more »

While I’ve driven all of my adult life in the US, I’ve not had a UK driver’s license for the five or so years I’ve lived here. This year I decided to change all that and enrolled on an intensive driving course so I could knock it out in two weeks. Sadly after a couple Read more »

Good product development practices are supposed to be built upon alignment and shared understanding, Jeff Gothelf, Author of Sense & Respond tells us at #mtpcon Singapore. But often, organisations end up looking a lot like that painting in the classic scene from the movie Goodfellas: One dog’s going one way, the other dog’s going the Read more »

Managing culture can quickly become one of the most complex challenges for companies that seek to scale agile practices. If self-organization and continuous improvement aren’t already tricky enough in a team of 10 individuals, they represent a daunting challenge when teams grow to the hundreds (not mentioning companies of thousands of people). Scaling agile practices[1] in Read more »

There are lots of different frameworks for how to run projects so they are ‘agile’. Tim Beattie takes us through some principles that will help you no matter which specific ways of working you choose to implement. Don’t Make Assumptions of Simplicity When working through a Discovery phase, you’ll be doing activities such as empathy Read more »

Often our role as Product Managers is to be a translator between the business and delivery teams. Here Morag McLaren looks at a few things she’s learned through this process when it comes to Agile. Don’t Forget the Other Parts of the Agile Manifesto Most people’s perception of the agile manifesto is that it tells Read more »

The internet lends itself to binary positions: you’re either for something or against it, advocating it or decrying it. It’s not just Twitter’s 280 characters that limit us to this black and white thinking, most blog posts and conference talks seem to follow the same trend. And I’m not even talking about politics. Waterfall vs Read more »

Lateral leadership describes the art of efficiently influencing others around you without formal authority. It is essential for succeeding in the implicit leadership position that product managers find themselves in. In this talk from this year’s MTP Engage in Hamburg, I share some advice on how product people can use lateral leadership in managing agile Read more »

Having worked on teams using agile methodologies for several years, retrospectives are a major part of my life as a product manager.  Retrospectives (retros) are held at the end of each sprint cycle, at the end of the overall release, and sometimes to review other meetings or processes. Retros are intended to review your team’s Read more »

Bashing agile is in vogue at the moment, so when veteran product manager and product design evangelist Jeff Patton suggested it as a topic for his keynote talk at MTP Engage I jumped at it. If the audience was expecting a speech which shot down agile methodologies, they were wrong. Instead Jeff started to deconstruct agile Read more »