Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 30th, 2017—shared with 7,968 peers—features two heavyweight agile champions on why scaling agile is futile. We also can confirm: the further east you go the less Scrum works. Sorry, we needed to address the elephant in the room.

On the product side, we dive deep into how to kill features and why this is important for any aspiring creator of a great product. (Spoiler alert: those embrace simplicity.) We also talk about the “cigarettes” of the B2C web industry, and what it takes to get ‘lean startup’ as a concept going in an enterprise.

Lastly: we learn about the unfortunate trend of creating local maxima due to a lack of long-term thinking. Enjoy Labor Day!

The Essential Read

Andrew Kortina : Metrics, Incrementalism, and Local Maxima Andrew Kortina observes now more often a failure pattern of becoming trapped in local maxima. It is easier to identify and measure metrics for short-term wins than for long-term investments.

Scaling Agile Is Futile & Scrum

Ron Jeffries : Implications of Enterprise Focus in Scrum Ron Jeffries on scaling agile, SAFe & Co and Scrum Alliance generating new certificates as rapidly as their PDF formatters can produce.

Dave Snowden : SAFe: the infantilism of management Mr. Cynefin Dave Snowden’s notion of SAFe is simple: It seemed to be PRINCE II camouflaged in Agile language.

(via AgileConnection ): 4 Balanced Metrics for Tracking Agile Teams Joel Bancroft-Connors outlines four suitable metrics for agile teams.

Scott Adams : Cultural Fit You might be too smart to work here.

Product & Lean

Steli Efti and Hiten Shah : 201: How to Kill Features in Your Product In this episode of the Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the process of killing features in your product.

Adam Risman (via Intercom ): Airtable's Andrew Ofstad on maintaining simplicity at scale Andrew Ofstad explains why complexity slowly creeps up on product builders, and what we can do to preserve the original simplicity of a product.

(via Board of Innovation ): The 9 Biggest Challenges for Corporates to implement Lean Startup Arne Van Balen shares the nine biggest challenges for corporates to implement lean startup and 23 great best practices to tackle them.

Nir Eyal (via Medium ): The Morality of Manipulation Nir Eyal points at the consumer web industry as a manipulation business based on a wave of habit-forming technologies.