Age of Product’s Food for Thought of June 11th, 2017—shared with 9,176 peers—doubts that Jeff Sutherland’s “Twice the Work in Half the Time” was helpful for the agile cause. We also join John Cutler who is growing tired of the agile bashing where agile is being made responsible for everything your organization fails at. Probably—just a thought—an agile transition needs more time than the suits were willing to allocate in their proposal to the board.

On the product side, we learn about twelve principles of running experiments, and how to gather feedback from stakeholders while avoiding that your product is caught between a rock and a hard place.

Lastly: Do you remember the workshop when you built a lego duck for the first time? We have a great story on how Lego managed to return from the brink of collapse.

Agile Bashing & Scrum

Ron Jeffries : Twice the Effort All the Time Ron Jeffries on Dark Scrum, the certification industry, and Jeff Sutherland’s unfortunate “Twice the Work in Half the Time.”

🏆 TIP OF THE WEEK—If you only can afford 10 minutes, read this one! TIP OF THE WEEK—If you only can afford 10 minutes, read this one!

John Cutler (via Hacker Noon ): Agile Didn’t Eat Your Homework… John Cutler is tired of reading articles that blame Agile for every conceivable dysfunction of the organization—a rant worth reading.

👍 Read this post if you disapprove of agile bashing. Read this post if you disapprove of agile bashing.

(via The Clever PM ): Why ‘Scrumbut’ Shouldn't Be a Bad Word The Clever PM believes that “ScrumBut” simply can’t be as bad as the Scrum folk want us to think.

Mike Orzen : 7 Things Coaches Need to Get Over Mike Orzen shares seven common misperceptions about coaching practical problem-solving skills and developing lean thinking.

Renee Troughton : Scaling Agile Tricks Series: Economically efficient teaming Renee Troughton shares an overview on agile team building, namely feature teams, component teams, and architectural layer teams.

📯 Update: Scrum Master Salary Report 2017

When we started the survey, I thought that we would collect data until May 1st, and have the report available by the end of May. That turned out to be a bit too optimistic given that four people are involved in creating the survey.

Therefore, we like to share in advance some of the findings from the 2017 Scrum Master Salary Report:

Women have astounding chances and salary possibilities in the field. (We could not identify a gender pay gap.)

The United States is the highest paying country for Scrum Masters, while India is the lowest.

Without some form of certification, getting into the career path is almost impossible.

Additional education has no effect on salary.

Some form of previous experience is often a prerequisite.

If you are in for the money, become a freelancer.

We are working hard to make the report available by the end of June or early July—and we kindly ask for your patience… 🙏

The Report Will Become an Application: As we keep getting new replies—we have already more than 685 as of today—we are planning to turn the report into a small application you can query yourself.

Product & Lean

Zevae M. Zaheer : 12 principles for better experiments Zevae M. Zaheer describes the twelve biggest challenges when moving to an experiment-first approach, and how to meet them.

👍 Hands-on rules on how to run experiments. Hands-on rules on how to run experiments.

(via First Round Capital ): Agile Orthodoxy: Dear PMs, It's Time to Rethink Agile at Enterprise Startups Ogi Kavazovic believes that too many product leaders attempt to develop enterprise software using short-term, agile thinking.

👍 Agile is unfit for creating B2B software? That are heretic thoughts, aren’t they? Agile is unfit for creating B2B software? That are heretic thoughts, aren’t they?

Julie Zhuo : How do you protect the product from being ‘designed by committee?’ Julie Zhuo shares her approach on gathering feedback and opinions from stakeholders a way that is helpful.

The Essential Read