Age of Product’s Food for Thought of February 12th, 2017—shared with 6,242 peers—focuses on the agile enterprise: from where the return on investment is, via balancing autonomy and accountability at Spotify, to being agile with distributed teams.

We also dive deep into product discovery and its evolution over the last 20 years, why large teams tend to fail on building great products, and why product roadmaps are still a nascent trend.

Last but not least: We enjoy the transcript of the Slack AMA with Spotify’s former VP of Product, and we silently enjoy browsing this week’s Dilbert comics.

Agile Enterprise

Steve Denning (via Forbes ): Beyond Agile Operations: How To Achieve The Holy Grail Of Strategic Agility Steve Denning explains why the main financial benefits from Agile management will flow from the next Agile frontier: achieving strategic Agility.

(via Harvard Business Review ): How Spotify Balances Employee Autonomy and Accountability Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, partners at Bain & Company, on balancing autonomy and accountability at Spotify.

Rich Mironov (via GigaOM ): How to unlock the promise of agile in the enterprise A free Gigaom report by Rich Mironov which analyzes the potential of becoming ‘agile’ in large organizations, pointing at that agile is not a silver bullet, though.

Jennifer Riggins (via Happy Melly ): What is a Teal Organization & future of work? Jennifer Riggins reflects on Frederic Laloux’s organizational categories and why Teal culture coach Tobias Meyer meanwhile considers Agile to be a “mechanical mindset”.

Hugo Messer (via InfoQ ): How to be Agile with Distributed Teams Hugo Messer explains that becoming a high-performing team is possible in a distributed group, it just takes more effort to overcome the inherent challenges of distance.

Product & Lean

Teresa Torres : The Evolution of Modern Product Discovery Teresa Tores shares her talk from Productized 2016 on the development of product discovery over the last 20 years.

(via MojoTech ): Why products built by large teams fail so often There’s a lot of pressure to become a “tech” company for established businesses — fast, responsive, and agile — and to build great products, but most of these teams don’t really know how.

Black Swan Farming : Product Roadmaps Joshua James asks what the “job to be done” is for which people hire product roadmaps, pointing at the fact that this practice is still somewhat nascent.

(via Deloitte Univ Press ): Tech Trends 2017 A free, yet comprehensive report on technological trends of 2017 from Deloitte.

Anton Badashov : Design Principles Behind Great Products Anton Badashov compiled a set of “design principles” based on the analysis of various makers of great products.

The Essential Reads

(via Product School ): Live Chat with Former VP of Product at Spotify Product School shares the transcript of an AMA session with Spotify’s former VP of Product Shiva Rajaraman on product management issues: from career options to being customer centric.