Some of Claus' inspirational sources

Claus is driven by a thirst for new insights and continuous improvement being visible on his bookshelves and time spent on the wealth of on-line  knowledge.

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Picks from Claus' bookshelves

Bent Flyvbjerg How Big Things Get Done – The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

Reed Hastings No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

BUILD

Tony Fadell Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Value Proposition Design

Alex Osterwalder Value Proposition Design: How to create products and services customers want

Testing Business Ideas

David J. Bland Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation

High-impact tools for teams

Stefano Mastrogiacomo High-Impact Tools for Teams

The Invincible Company

Alex Osterwalder The Invincible Company

The Lean Product Playbook

Dan Olsen The Lean Product Playbook: How to innovate with minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback

Effective Project Management

Robert K. Wysocki Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Hybrid

Steven Levy IN THE PLEX: How Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives

Thinking fast and slow

Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow

Radical Focus 2nd edition

Christina Wodtke Radical Focus, second edition

Product Operations

Melissa Perri Product Operations – How successful companies build better products at scale

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Sprint

Jake Knapp Sprint – How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

User Story Mapping

Jeff Patton User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product

Essential Scrum

Kenneth S. Rubin Essential Scrum: A practical guide to the most popular agile process

Lean Software Development

Mary and Tom Poppendieck Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept To Cach

Lean Software - an agile toolkit

Mary and Tom Poppendieck Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

Agile Estimating and Planning

Mike Cohn Agile Estimating and Planning

Coaching Agile Teams

Lyssa Adkins Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition

David J. Anderson Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

Scrumban

Corey Ladas Scrumban – Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development

The Scrumban [R]Evolution

Ajay Reddy The Scrumban [R]Evolution: Getting the Most Out of Agile, Scrum, and Lean Kanban

SAFe 5 Distilled

Richard Knaster, Dean Leffingwell SAFe DISTILLED

Scrum for hardware design

David G. Ullman Scrum for Hardware Design

Making sense of Agile Project Management_200x244

Charles G Cobb  Making Sense of Agile Project Management – Balancing Control and Agility

PRINCE2 manual

AXELOS Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 ©

Pseuco-work

Dennis Nørmark & Anders Fogh Jensen Pseudo-work: How we ended up being busy doing nothing

7 habits

Stephen R. Covey The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People

Please note that Claus is in no way affiliated with the authors of these books.

Some of Claus' on-line sources of inspiration

Elements of Amazon’s Day 1 Culture – quote: “Amazon’s *Day 1* mentality is a culture and an operating model that puts customers at the center of everything Amazon does. Putting *Day 1″* into practice relies on maintaining a long-term focus, obsessing over customers, and bold innovation.

Contrast this to a *Day 2* mentality: as a company grows over time, it needs to adjust its approach to effectively manage the organization as it scales. The danger is that as this happens, decision making can slow down, and the company can become less agile, moving further and further away from the customer as it rotates focus towards internal challenges rather than external customer-centric innovation.”

Sustaining a Day 1 Culture – quote: “If you create a culture that pushes itself to look for new ways to delight customers every single day, in all parts of your business, it will drive you to invent on their behalf.”

Silicon valley product group (svpg) is founded by Marty Cagan, the author of the two books “EMPOWERED” and “INSPIRED” above. This blog nicely extends the books.

The CSPO Pathology – quote: “The fastest growing pathology I see, especially outside the US, is people confusing a product owner (the role on an Agile delivery team) with a product manager

Revenge of the PMO – quote: “A couple years ago I wrote about the root causes of product failure in product companies and I identified ten key attributes of Waterfall and project-mindset. I went through and compared this list with SAFe, and literally all ten problems exist in SAFe. Indeed, I would argue that all ten problems are inherent in that process.”

Product Ops Overview – quote: “From my own interactions with companies implementing or exploring Product Ops, I have found no fewer than six distinct definitions.

So the first and most obvious question is why so many different definitions? 

My theory is that while the term emerged as a roughly parallel concept to DevOps, the original concept of DevOps refers primarily to tools and technology to empower engineers to accelerate their code into production, but I haven’t encountered anyone trying to do roughly analogous tooling for product managers (other than tool vendors of course).

I think that’s partly because there are already plenty of off-the-shelf solutions for the major tools like roadmap and OKR tools, but mainly because unlike engineering, for most things PM’s do, it’s simply not a function of the tools, so the original meaning of DevOps doesn’t really apply so well to product management.

That said, the concept of empowering product managers to do good work, much like we empower engineers, resonates very easily.”

Teresa Torres run this blog, and she is the author of the book “Continuous Discovery Habits” above. Teresa is generously sharing insights in her blog.

You need to search a bit, and you’ll find a wealth of high-quality articles.

Steve Denning writes primarily about Leadership Strategy. Here an example where he touches upon Agile ..

Understanding Fake Agile – quote: “There is also Agile in the sense of the various Agile brands promoted by consultants and trainers, of which there are hundreds. These are multiple variants of the same underlying idea of Agile. Yet often there is an insistence on using particular terms and specific named processes, which are defined in this way for the commercial purpose of distinguishing their offering from competing consultants and trainers.

A particularly unfortunate form of *branded Agile* concerns scaling frameworks. A worrying variant is the Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe. Essentially this is codified bureaucracy, in which the customer is almost totally absent. It is now pervasive in large firms because it gives the management a mandate to call themselves agile and keep doing what they have always done.”

Why Finding The Real Meaning Of Agile Is Hard – quote: “The answers you get to the question as to what *Agile* means will depend on who you ask. For many, Agile (or business agility or organizational agility, or whatever you want to call it), has come to mean a paradigm shift in management, a fundamental rethinking about how work gets done in the 21st century.

As Thomas Kuhn explained when he introduced the concept of a paradigm shift, it’s normal to encounter a great deal of confusion as to what is going on while the paradigm shift is happening. If you go around talking to random people asking what “agile” means, you will inevitably get very different answers, particularly if you are talking to people who are stuck in the old paradigm, or who are having problems implementing the new paradigm.”

The Mindset That Kills Product Thinking – quote: “You can deliver what you said you would every sprint, and it may not matter if the work doesn’t result in the outcomes your organization predicted. Doing agile by the book may result in you being a great service provider, but not a successful product creator.”

Dual Track Development is not Duel Track – quote: “Development work focuses on predictability and quality.  Discovery work focuses on fast learning and validation.  Discovery and development are visualized in two tracks because it’s two kinds of work, and two kinds of thinking.”

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