What are your biggest risks in Product Development?
We asked Product Managers, Business Analysts, and Project Managers to identify their most challenging product development risks. See how these three professional groups ranked the risks. Business Analysts: Risks in Product Development 1. Product incompletely addresses the needs of targeted users 2. The design of the product is inherently flawed 3. The product is not […]
Energize Your Meetings Series
All of us have led or attended meetings that were boring or a waste of time. We aspire to lead meetings so people are engaged, actively contributing, and eager to help solve the pressing problems. In this blog series, we’ll share exercises increasing engagement and ways to energize your meetings. These are great tips for Scrum […]
Energize Your Meetings – Exercises to Prepare for Long Meetings
This is Part 3 of a 3-part blog series for Scrum Masters, Product and Product Managers, and facilitators. Use these exercises to lead long meetings that are fun and energized, resulting in more participant engagement. These exercises are great for re-energizing a group, especially in long meetings. Highly interactive, these exercises are fun and also break […]
Energize Your Meetings-Exercises to Break the Ice
This is Part 1 of a 3-part blog series for Scrum Masters, Product and Product Managers, and facilitators. Use these exercises to break the ice and lead meetings that are fun and energized, resulting in more participant engagement. Exercise 1: Ball Toss Name Game This exercise is a great way to breath the ice for […]
Energize Your Meetings – Exercises to Encourage Brainstorming
This is Part 2 of a 3-part blog series for Scrum Masters, Product and Product Managers, and facilitators. Use these exercises to incite brainstorming meetings that are fun and energized, resulting in more participant engagement. Exercise 1: Pass the Card This silent exercise is helpful for gathering input from all meeting attendees. It is great for […]
Austin Business Journal-Best Places to Work
The Austin Business Journal named Agile Velocity in the top ten of the best places to work in Austin for the micro companies category. Agile Velocity was named to the list for the first time, ranking #8 out of 20 micro companies. This award was announced at a luncheon hosted by the Austin Business Journal […]
Advanced Release Charting Template – Part 2
In the first part of this blog series, we introduced the Advanced Release Chart Template and discussed how to communicate progress to customers and stakeholders using burnup and burndown charts. The second and final part of this blog series drills into the details of what’s being delivered in the release to help drive decisions and […]
Advanced Release Charting Template – Part 1
In October 2012, we released our first downloadable template to help forecast and chart release progress. Since that time, we’ve helped many organizations transition to Agile and found some recurring needs that have driven the creation of the Advanced Release Charting template: Set expectations about deadlines and report to stakeholders. Will the desired scope be […]
Lean: Purity vs. Pragmatism
“That’s not Agile and Lean!” “We’re not being lean enough.” “We’re not supposed to make deliverables!” Sound familiar? I hear these statements all the time from teams moving towards a more evidence-based approach to product discovery, conception, and production. Somewhere, someone made a decision for the teams to now “do Agile & Lean” and so, […]
Building In-House Agile Innovation Teams: Transparency
In the first post of the series, I discussed the basic building blocks of a successful in-house innovation team: small, dedicated, collocated, and self-sufficient. In this post, I’m going to talk about a key philosophy for these teams: transparency. It’s not in our nature to be transparent in the business world (or in the personal […]