It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.

The problem is that monoprocess pretty much entirely does not work for any creative/agile endeavour. Things are valuable exactly because they are complicated and messy.

A lot to like in this article (“They avoid scrum and SAFe like the plague.‌‌”) but I’ll settle for adopting the core thrust of it and just retiring the entire concept of a PO and never have to debate “What is the difference between a PM and a PO?” ever again.

https://www.digitalproductjobs.com/why-do-they-keep-hiring-product-owners-and-not-product-managers-and-why-you-should-avoid-companies-that-do/

Despite not being the biggest fan of Shape Up or of 37s, I still really enjoyed watching this video by Ryan Singer about Shaping.

It’s very well done and though I wouldn’t recommend anybody to follow this by the book, you would do well to take inspiration from it.

Love to see these updates from the German Digital Service. Not sure everybody knows that that organization exists now and what they’re busy with.

The work they’re doing is really good but what’s really staggering is how much of a gap they have to bridge here. These are basic buildings blocks of digital transformation that advanced societies tackled 10-20 years ago.

https://digitalservice.bund.de/blog/mit-kommunikationsdesign-nutzerzentrierte-verwaltungsmodernisierung-unterstuetzen

People see this kind of talk about self-governance and think there is no process or management in such a setup while usually there is more (and higher quality) than in a traditional organization. It’s also some of the best work you will ever do.

https://www.outseta.com/posts/what-is-self-management-how-self-managed-teams-operate-without-hierarchy

Having seen lots of teams stuck in the two week agile rat race, a framework like Shape Up seems like it could offer a lot of benefits. But also just changing things up can’t hurt at that point. What is agility if not also being able to iterate on the way you work?