Last month I attended the Agile2012 Conference, where the core themes were Agile Organization Transformation and thoughts challenging the effectiveness of the currently defined Product Owner role.
Agile Organization Transformation
- We are failing at agile adoption 3 out of 5 times – Sahota
- Do you have a deliberate plan on how you are going to change the organizational culture? – Sahota
- The only thing of real importance that leader sod is to create and manage culture – Edgar Schein
- Culture = how do we do things around here to succeed – Sahota
- Read more: The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work by William E. Schneider
- Lots of talk about Being Agile vs. Doing Agile
- Doing – Process, Tools, Instructions, Ceremonies
- Being – Values, team reaction, understanding, adaptability, leadership everywhere, failure is ok
- Wait until there is friction before you define new roles or processes
- Navy seals have teams of 4 and some argue for 5, but everyone agrees 6+ is too much as it creates to much communication overhead
- Bad interactions pack 5x the wallop of good interactions
- Bad is stronger than good. Bad behavior is stronger, longer-lasting, more contagious and more difficult to stop than good
- Spiral Dynamics was an interesting tool to use when trying to measure team maturity
- Jurgen Appelo How to Change the World
Product Owner Role Change?
- Most companies are drowning in a sea of opportunity – Rubin
- Interesting dimensions that affect what type of PO and process work – Patton
- Are your users internal or external?
- Do your users have control over the use of your product?
- Velocity isn’t a measure of value. The outcome is where we need to measure if we are delivering value. Are we changing the world? – Patton
- Found a Jeff Patton presentation where he talked about the Underpants gnomes. He is now one of my new favorite thought leaders.
- What if the PO role was defined as a servant to the team to help facilitate bringing the customer perspective closer to the team? – Patton
- MVPe = minimal viable product experiment. Smallest viable experiment to validate a product hypothesis – Patton
- We need to be focused on learning about outcomes – Patton
- David Hussman
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- The product backlog is too much about delivery and not discovery
- The Product Owner is structured as a singular failure which needs to be distributed
- We need a group of people speaking with one voice
- Stories often miss the real value
- Focus on User-centered user experiences over user stories and product backlog
- Once you are not bad at delivering, then you need to start focusing on delivering the right thing
- Discovering through mapping
- Name the goal
- List a few examples (simple complex)
- Walk a day in the life of each activity
- Back up and resell the experience
- The problem is that documentation isn’t read. It doesn’t allow us to get interaction and discovery
- Can everyone on the team tell the story?
- Leave the map whole. The map gets you discovery and then you create the delivery stories underneath which may duplicate.
- Story maps show examples
- Examples are a type of test
- Story maps can drive testing
- A test would be one scenario of a path through the story map
- Story maps foster product thinking, product learning (MVP) thin sliced product discovery
- Pragmatic bookshelf Videos $50 for 6 hours of content
- When you are unclear, say ” can you give me an example?”
Misc.
- Played a great game where you start a story and each person in the circle adds to it
- 1st round you start your statement with “yes, but”
- 2nd round – “yes, and”
- 3rd round – “yes, and because of that”
- Try it and see which one takes the team into a very negative place and which one creates a much more positive and constructive discussion
- High trust companies outperform low trust companies by 300% – Pixton
References:
- When you’re Agile you get Lean by Charlie Rudd
