Age of Product’s Food for Thought of May 21st, 2017—shared with 8,724 peers—focuses on team building. We learn how to build a team for success and how to preserve its health by fighting criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. We understand that teams do not disrupt industry when they are kept in functional silos and that providing too much support as a coach can be harmful.

On the product side, we dive deep into the delicate balance between product discovery and product delivery. Also, we have to overcome a long-time bias that engineers want to code and nothing but to code.

Lastly: You are interested in Jeff Bezos’ secret sauce? Read on and find out what the best transformational leaders do according to this brand-new study.

Agile Team Building & Scrum

Christina Wodtke (via Medium ): Design the Team You Need to Succeed 🏆 TIP OF THE WEEK Christina Wodtke shares her “high performing team” creation framework—the holy grail for modern companies.

The Travel Chica : Coaching Secret: Stop being so helpful Stephanie Ockerman on having good coaching intentions that may hurt more than help and how to avoid them.

Nagesh Sharma (via Scrum.org ): Key Tips for Scrum Masters to Heal Team Toxins and Create Healthy Teams Nagesh Sharma shares his view of the Four Horsemen of the (software development) Apocalypse: Criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling.

Claire Lew (via Basecamp ): 11 ways to get feedback from your most introverted employee Being an introvert herself, Claire Lew shares eleven things to encourage even your most introverted team member to be more forthcoming with you.

(via Corporate Rebels ): Destroy The Hierarchical Pyramid And Build A Powerful Network of Teams Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree explain why the move from hierarchical pyramids to a network of teams is essential for innovative organizations.

(via InfoQ ): Forming Self-Selected Teams – How to Create Happy, Empowered, and Effective Teams Amber King and Jesse Huth share from their experience at Opower where 40 engineers were allowed to self-select six teams that would work on new projects.

From the Blog: 27 Sprint Anti-Patterns Holding Back Scrum Teams

The sprint, yet another scrum event where you can find plenty of sprint anti-patterns to make your life as a scrum team harder than necessary. Learn how to identify and overcome them.

Read More: 27 Sprint Anti-Patterns Holding Back Scrum Teams.

Product & Lean

Indi Young (via Medium ): When to be Hasty with Product Research Indi Young details how to balance product discovery and product delivery in a unified process.

Dale Cantwell (via Intercom ): Empathy engineering: bridging the gap from code to customer Dale Cantwell, an engineer at Intercom, has a confession to make: he likes talking to customers.

The Essential Read