Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 16th, 2017—shared with 7,528 peers—enjoys in this issue lipstick agile, tragile, and wagile. Also, we learn why US-made tomato paste represents a success story for self-management aficionados, who – by the way – may soon be joined by venture capitalists like Fred Wilson.

We then dive deep into hands-on tips on how to improve distributed agile in general, and the remote product backlog refinement in particular.

On the product side, it is again all about product discovery, outcome vs. output, real-time, continuous user research, and how Jeff Bezos intends to keep Amazon relevant – by inventing on behalf of customers.

Lastly: If you haven’t yet contributed to the ‘Scrum Master Salary Report 2017’ hurry up and join 435 peers who already did so. And one more thing: We have a list of 400 Slack Communities. Just in case, you may free time at hands.

Lipstick Agile & Scrum

Peter Hyde (via Front Row Agile ): Linguistics in Agile Peter Hyde shares his top-ten list of anti-agile terms. (Gee, I love ‘lipstick agile’.)

Doug Kirkpatrick (via InfoQ ): The Age of the Self-managed Organization Doug Kirkpatrick discusses self-management at Business Agility 2017: creating an organization without bosses and titles, being agile and innovative, and creating strategic business advantages.

Fred Wilson : Decentralized Self-Organizing Systems VC Fred Wilson believes it is high time that political scientists, philosophers, economists, and historians turn their attention to these new self-organizing and self-governing systems.

Hugo Messer (via ConfEngine ): The top 5 problems with distributed agile – Agile India 2017 Hugo Messer shares in this talk how an agile mindset helps leadership to make distributed teams work. And he gives practical solutions for teams to collaborate better across culture and timezones.

Samantha Laing (via Growing Agile ): The remote backlog grooming / refinement session Sam Laing reports on what it takes to run a remote product backlog refinement session successfully.

Join 435 Peers And Contribute to the Anonymous Poll ‘Scrum Master Salary Report 2017’

The purpose of this anonymous poll is to create a clear, data-backed benchmark that allows everyone in the agile community to get an understanding whether her or his compensation is adequate.

The report will cover Scrum Master as well as Agile Coaches, both employed and freelancing.

To generate an acceptable first report, we will need at least 500 answers. A larger sample would allow providing more detailed insights, though. At the moment, we already have 435 of 500 replies.

Participate in the ‘Scrum Master Salary Report 2017’ survey now…

Product & Lean

Jeff Patton : Output vs. Outcome & Impact In this hand-drawn video, Jeff Patton talks about how product thinking moves our focus from fast output to outcome and impact.

Nikky Hofland (via Mind The Product ): When was the Last Time you Talked to Your Customers? Nikky Hofland shares a practical lesson in real-time, continuous customer research, starring Intercom, an open roadmap on Trello and a user channel on Slack.

(via Amazon ): EX-99.1: Amazon’s Letter To Shareholders 2017 Jeff Bezos on true customer obsession: “There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, […]. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.”

(via WhatUsersDo ): 28 Expert Opinions on User-centred Product Management Tom Lloyd asked 28 of the best product managers around how they remain user-centred while balancing these seemingly competing voices.

John Zilch and Ellen Gottesdiener : The 7 Product Dimensions: A Guide to Asking the Right Questions John Zilch writes on product partners, stakeholders, a framework of seven product dimensions and how to ask the right questions to enable teams to deliver value to customers.

The Essential Read