Food for Thought’s issue #101—shared with 10,065 peers—focusses on how to get ‘agile’ to work in your organization. We learn that an old OSS manual on do-it-yourself organizational sabotage still sounds very familiar today. We then get advice on how C-level manager may become more agile, and why we should replace Taylorism’s mindset of command & control with trust.

We also listen to John Cutler explaining his feature factory concept and embrace the importance of mental models to improve the way we learn. Speaking of stepping up the game, you can do so, too, with your next set of A/B tests. Kevin Shanahan provides a step-by-step guide.

Finally, we follow Piyush Tantia when he describes a new way for engineering applications and human interactions: behavioral design.

Have a great week!

Agile Sabotage & Scrum

Bob Sutton (via Stanford ECorner ): Rebecca Hinds: DIY Sabotage: Lick The Cookie Bob Sutton and his co-conspirator Rebecca Hinds crack open a recently declassified World War II OSS field manual for undercover saboteurs, drawing parallels to the ways businesses undermine themselves and competitors.

(via Harvard Business Review ): How to Make Agile Work for the C-Suite Eric Garton and Andy Noble of Bain & Company recommend senior management teams to do the following to become agile.

Paulo Rebelo (via Front Row Agile ): Don’t Limit the Role of the Scrum Master Paulo Rebelo shares some tips and practices to help Scrum Masters excel in their role and add real value to their organization.

(via Corporate Rebels ): Get Rid of Your Outdated Industrial Age Thinking and Let Your People Go Surfing Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree on getting rid of control mechanisms and the outdated industrial age thinking and introducing high levels of freedom and trust instead.

(via Hacker Noon ): Taking [Microsoft] Office Agile Terry Crowley talks about are the engineering and organizational changes of the Microsoft Office team when they started shipping software more often.

Product & Lean

Ryan Ripley and John Cutler : AFH 072: Agile Product Management with John Cutler John Cutler and Amitai Schleier joined host Ryan Ripley to discuss feature factories, outcomes, and excellent agile product management.

Hiten Shah (via Product Habits ): 5 Mental Models that Help Product Managers Acquire and Retain Users Hiten Shah suggests embracing mental models to become a product management ‘learning machine.’

Jackie Bavaro (via Medium ): How we build our Product Roadmap at Asana Jackie Bavaro introduces the ‘Pyramid of Clarity’ concept for product roadmaps that helps everyone at Asana do their best work.

(via Mind The Product ): Stepping up Your A/B Tests Kevin Shanahan shares some of the learnings from 60+ A/B tests at Peak, looking at each step of the A/B testing cycle.

Sachin Rekhi (via Medium ): The Hierarchy of User Friction Sachin Rekhi shares his view of a hierarchy of user friction and provides examples for solving for each.

The Essential Read

(via Social Innovation ): The New Science of Designing for Humans Piyush Tantia describes how the rise of behavioral science has created a new way for engineering applications and human interactions: behavioral design.

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