Kategori: ProductManagement

Empowered (book review)

Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Very crisp overview of what patterns make modern technology driven product company and product organization great: empowered product teams driven by a real product vision and strategy and managed by dedicated managers that know how to formulate real and exciting problem, hold teams accountable and coach people to become their better selves: servant leadership. Targeted to Product leaders, whom I’m certain there are a lot out there that need to read, understand and practice this book. A must read I will revisit many times, just like Inspired.

– An empowered team does not equal a team that decides on a company direction, a focus for a quarter or a company bet to take. That is an executive decision that the team needs to trust as much as the executives need to trust the team to know how to solve the challenge or get to the goal.
– Empowering teams have full decisional power over the problem/opportunity they are assigned, not on identifying the opportunity itself.
– Alignment is not just pointing to a north star and handing out a compas, it requires real work with teams.
– Autonomy does not mean self reliance but ownership of solving a problem that matters together with others.
– Leadership means active engagement. I call I servant leadership, but that’s anything but standing aside and let whatever happen.



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What I did and learned at Spotify

I’m leaving the band, I’m going solo.
Thanks for these 6 years Spotify,
lots of fun, lots of hard work, so many lovely people,
so much done and so much learned.
Here’s some of the most important stuff I did,
and learned on this tour,
which I will bring with me on my new tour,
as a contractor, trainer and author.

Contractor, Trainer & Author at antman.se

I joined as an agile coach,
but ended up driving coaches out of the teams,
and managers into the teams: scrum master as manager,
the missing piece in the Spotify model (never but a dream anyway).

Fortsätt läsa ”What I did and learned at Spotify”

The Agile Meetings Cube

Agile Meetings Cibe
Agile Meeting Cube

Agile facilitators, be aware, now you are about to be replaced – by a cube. Just kidding. But have you ever felt that your meetings are not on track? Or that you have a hard time doing the elevator pitch for that backlog grooming meeting you would like your team to have? Or do you meeting often ends in thin air? Comes your rescue: The Agile Meeting Cube.

Read more about the cube in this Crisp.se blogpost and download the cube here.

Facilitating the Elephant Carpaccio Exercise

One of the best exercises I know of on how to learn and practice User Story slicing techniques is the so called Elephant Carpaccio exercise. To help facilitate the workshop I put together these slides. You can read more about it in this Crisp.se blogpost and access the presentation here.

Let the User Story Flow

One of my biggest surprises when I first met the squads I where going to work with at Spotify was that none of them were using User Stories. At first I observed to see their alternative. Unfortunately there was none. I developed this workshop to try to introduce the concept. Read more and get the slides from Crisp.se