Age of Product’s Food for Thought of March 12th, 2017—shared with 6,758 peers—dips into agile frameworks, and organizational aspects of culture, and how the first usually fail to change the latter. We also learn how to make working in distributed teams suck less.

On the product side, we dive deep into how to apply Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle to chart a new idea or venture, we learn why rigorous, and ruthless prioritization is king, and that embracing bad product ideas can lead to insights that allow creating something people love.

Lastly: David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp reflects on Silicon Valley’s religion of growth at all costs.

Agile Frameworks & Scrum

Jurgen Appelo (via Agility Scales ): How to Un-suck Methods and Frameworks According to Jurgen Appelo, most methods and frameworks suck as change programs. They are collections of good ideas, offered in terrible packaging. But he has a suggestion how we can un-suck the frameworks.

Leon Tranter : The myth of culture change – rethinking culture in organisations Leon Tranter believes that a lot of what is being written about “culture change” is nonsense as people do not analyze the organizational aspects of culture accurately.

Michael Göthe (via Crisp ): The iZettle Example: Decentralized Tech Development In Practice (Case Study) Michael Göthe shares some of the things Crisp has been implementing and tweaking at iZettle to keep producing great results and attracting in-demand, talented developers while growing from 6 to 450 staff.

Katy Sherman : The Truth About Full-Time Scrum Masters That You Won't Like Katy Sherman asks: Should Scrum Master be a full-time or a part-time role? And points at the importance whether the entire organization is ready for Agile to answer that question.

Karen Greaves (via Growing Agile ): Agile in Distributed Teams Karen Greaves and Sam Laing share in this video their lessons learned on how to make working in distributed teams more bearable, even if those span multiple time-zones.

Join 191 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 300 answers. A larger sample would allow providing more detailed insights, though. At the moment, we already have 191 of 300 replies.

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

Product & Lean

Ash Maurya : A 3x3x3 Perspective for getting your Vision, Strategy, and Product aligned Ash Maurya applies Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle to deconstructing a new idea or venture as it maps quite nicely to the vision, strategy, and product pyramid.

Brandon Chu (via Medium ): Ruthless Prioritization Brandon Chu—Product Director at Shopify—introduces the reader to his framework of rigorous, and ruthless prioritization.

Steve Portigal (via Mind The Product ): The Power of Bad Product Ideas Steve Portigal—author of “Interviewing Users”—challenges product managers to re-think the idea-generation process by inviting in bad ideas.

Samuel Hulick : Product People, Mind the Gap! Samuel Hulick wants you to ask yourself a simple question and thus create a product that people love. Don't you know which? Read on.

Teresa Torres : The Ladder of Evidence: Get More Value From Your Customer Interviews and Product Experiments Teresa Torres stresses that one of the best signs of an effective product team is a regular cadence of customer interviews and product experiments. And she walks you through a simple framework to do so.

The Essential Read