Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization. Writing for current managers and developers moving into management, Appelo shares insights that are grounded in modern complex systems theory, reflecting the intense complexity of modern software development. Appelo's Management 3.0 model recognizes that today's organizations are living, networked systems; and that management is primarily about people and relationships. Management 3.0 doesn't offer mere checklists or prescriptions to follow slavishly; rather, it deepens your understanding of how organizations and Agile teams work and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Drawing on his extensive experience as an Agile manager, the author identifies the most important practices of Agile management and helps you improve each of them. Coverage includes - Getting beyond "Management 1.0" control and "Management 2.0" fads - Understanding how complexity affects your organization - Keeping your people active, creative, innovative, and motivated - Giving teams the care and authority they need to grow on their own - Defining boundaries so teams can succeed in alignment with business goals - Sowing the seeds for a culture of software craftsmanship - Crafting an organizational network that promotes success - Implementing continuous improvement that actually works Thoroughly pragmatic-and never trendy-Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0 helps you bring greater agility to any software organization, team, or project.

    In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better.Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomesBring the designers’ toolkit to the rest of your product teamShare your insights with your team much earlier in the processCreate Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are validIncorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycleMake your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile’s Scrum frameworkUnderstand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UXLean UX received the 2013 Jolt Award from Dr. Dobb's Journal as the best book of the year. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.

    But in today’s service- and software-driven world, “done” is less obvious. When is Amazon done? When is Google done? Or Facebook? In reality, services powered by digital systems are never done. So then how do we give teams a goal that they can work on?Mostly, we simply ask teams to build features—but features are the wrong way to go. We often build features that create no value. Instead, we need to give teams an outcome to achieve. Using outcomes creates focus and alignment. It eliminates needless work. And it puts the customer at the center of everything you do.Setting goals as outcomes sounds simple, but it can be hard to do in practice. This book is a practical guide to using outcomes to guide the work of your team. "Josh’s crisp volume brims with insight about how to fly at just the right level - the level of outcomes. If you’ve ever wondered how M your MVP should be, or how to get more R in your OKRs, this book will help." --Nick Rockwell, CTO, NY Times

    The book has three parts: Principles: Part one covers the leadership principles that PMs use to lead their team to overcome adversity. When your product fails to gain traction, when your team falls apart, or when your manager gives you tough feedback—these are all opportunities to learn principles that will help you succeed. Product development: Part two covers how PMs at Facebook, Amazon, and other top companies build products. We'll walk through the end-to-end product development process— from understanding the customer problem to identifying the right product to build to executing with your team to bring the product to market. Getting the job: Part three covers how you can land a PM job and reach the interview stage at the right company. We'll prep you for the three most common types of PM interviews— product sense, execution, and behavioral—with detailed frameworks and examples for each. Hear directly from product leaders at Airbnb, Amazon, Google, and more on: How to overcome challenging situations from a VP of Product at Amazon. How to build a great product roadmap from product leaders at LinkedIn and Airbnb. How Google, Airbnb, and other top companies evaluate PM candidates from leaders at those companies. How PMs can grow their career from a Director at Instagram and Twitter. Table of Contents1. PrinciplesTake OwnershipPrioritize and ExecuteStart with WhyFind the TruthBe Radically TransparentBe Honest with Yourself2. Product DevelopmentProduct Development LoopUnderstanding the Customer ProblemSelecting a Goal MetricMission, Vision, and StrategyBuilding a Product RoadmapDefining Product RequirementsGreat Project ManagementEffective CommunicationMaking Good Decisions3. Getting the JobPreparing for the TransitionMaking the TransitionFinding the Right CompanyAcing your PM InterviewsProduct Sense InterviewExecution InterviewBehavioral InterviewYour First 30 Days4. Product Leader Interviews

    But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

    Creating something from nothing is an unpredictable journey. The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go. We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood.    Broken into three sections with 100+ lessons, this no-nonsense book will help you: • Endure the roller coaster of successes and failures by strengthening your resolve, embracing the long-game, and short-circuiting your reward system to get to the finish line. • Optimize what’s working so you can improve the way you hire, better manage your team, and meet your customers’ needs. • Finish strong and avoid the pitfalls many entrepreneurs make, so you can overcome resistance, exit gracefully, and continue onto your next creative endeavor with ease. With insightful interviews from today’s leading entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and executives, as well as Belsky’s own experience working with companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, and sweetgreen, The Messy Middle will outfit you to find your way through the hardest parts of any bold project or new venture.

    The rules? No marketing budget, no PR stunts, and it must be sustainably successful. No short-term fads.This is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill and strategy.And it begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others?The answer doesn’t live in the sustainably successful products or services. The answer lives in those who use them.Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don’t depend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams.Every role is a key player in this game. Product development, engineering, marketing, user experience, support—everyone on the team. Even if that team is a start-up of one. Armed with a surprisingly overlooked science and a unique POV, we can can reduce the role of luck. We can build sustainably successful products and services that rely not on unethical persuasive marketing tricks but on helping our users have deeper, richer experiences. Not just in the moments while they’re using our product but, more importantly, in the moments when they aren’t.

    At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.

    With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.Determine whether people will buy your product before you build itListen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycleUnderstand why you should design a test before you design a productGet nine tools that are critical to designing your productDiscern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-havesLearn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisionsUse A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practicesSpeed up your product development process without sacrificing quality

    Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership -- or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.Focusing on "disruptive technology" -- the Honda Super Cub, Intel's 8088 processor, or the hydraulic excavator, for example -- Christensen shows why most companies miss "the next great wave." Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, "The Innovator's Dilemma" presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.

    But for every groundbreaking business that started this way, a thousand others have stalled or failed. Why? What’s the secret to success? What do Khan Academy, the GoPro camera, the Dyson vacuum cleaner and Kickstarter have in common? After years of consulting with hundreds of innovators, creatives, entrepreneurs and business leaders to help them tell the stories of their ideas, I have discovered something: every business that flies starts not with the best idea, the biggest budget or better marketing, but with the story of someone who wants to do something—and can’t. We don’t change the world by starting with our brilliant ideas, our dreams; we change the world by helping others to live their dreams. The story of ideas that fly is the story of the people who embrace them, love them, adopt them, care about them and share them. Successful ideas are the ones that become meaningful to others—helping them to see what’s possible for them. Our ideas fly when we show others their wings.

    . .Most developers, testers, and managers on IT projects are pretty good at recognizing patterns of behavior and gut-level hunches, as in, I sense that this project is headed for disaster.But it has always been more difficult to transform these patterns and hunches into a usable form, something a team can debate, refine, and use. Until now.In Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, the six principal consultants of The Atlantic Systems Guild present the patterns of behavior they most often observe at the dozens of IT firms they transform each year, around the world.The result is a quick-read guide to identifying nearly ninety typical scenarios, drawing on a combined one-hundred-and-fifty years of project management experience. Project by project, you'll improve the accuracy of your hunches and your ability to act on them. The patterns are presented in an easy-reference format, with names designed to ease communication with your teammates. In just a few words, you can describe what's happening on your project. Citing the patterns of behavior can help you quickly move those above and below you to the next step on your project. You'll find classic patterns such as these:* News Improvement* Management By Mood Ring* Piling On* Rattle Yer Dags* Natural Authority* Food++* Fridge Door* and more than eighty more!Not every pattern will be evident in your organization, and not every pattern is necessarily good or bad. However, you'll find many patterns that will apply to your current and future assignments, even in the most ambiguous circumstances. When you assess your situation and follow your next hunch, you'll have the collective wisdom of six world-class consultants at your side.

    In fact, it's now considered the fourth most important title in corporate America—yet only a tiny fraction of product managers have been trained for this vital position. If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people who hold this essential job—or simply aspire to break into a new role—Product Management For Dummies gives you the tools to increase your skill level and manage products like a pro. From defining what product management is—and isn't—to exploring the rising importance of product management in the corporate world, this friendly and accessible guide quickly gets you up to speed on everything it takes to thrive in this growing field. It offers plain-English explanations of the product life cycle, market research, competitive analysis, market and pricing strategy, product roadmaps, the people skills it takes to effectively influence and negotiate, and so much more. Create a winning strategy for your product Gather and analyze customer and market feedback Prioritize and convey requirements to engineering teams effectively Maximize revenues and profitability Product managers are responsible for so much more than meets the eye—and this friendly, authoritative guide lifts the curtain on what it takes to succeed.

    Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere. Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Internet Explorer, and lead program manager for Windows and MSN, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to get through a large software or web development project. Making Things Happen doesn't cite specific methods, but focuses on philosophy and strategy. Unlike other project management books, Berkun offers personal essays in a comfortable style and easy tone that emulate the relationship of a wise project manager who gives good, entertaining and passionate advice to those who ask. Topics in this new edition include:How to make things happenMaking good decisionsSpecifications and requirementsIdeas and what to do with themHow not to annoy peopleLeadership and trustThe truth about making datesWhat to do when things go wrongComplete with a new forward from the author and a discussion guide for forming reading groups/teams, Making Things Happen offers in-depth exercises to help you apply lessons from the book to your job. It is inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, and definitely the one book that you and your team need to have within arm's reach throughout the life of your project. Coming from the rare perspective of someone who fought difficult battles on Microsoft's biggest projects and taught project design and management for MSTE, Microsoft's internal best practices group, this is valuable advice indeed. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.