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Several of my clients have internal struggles about how to internally see the future of the product. The managers think they need it “all” instead of using how little thinking to create a product the customers will love. Some possibilities: Assess the product/project risks to choose a lifecycle. What can you do?
Strategy and Product Feedback Loops About 20 years ago, I taught a project management workshop to IT people. Their products and services did not ship outside the building—their products and services enabled the organization to make money. See Customers, Internal Delivery, And Trust for a recent post about demos and trust.)
When I work with these teams or their managers, I realize they're not demoing or retrospecting on a regular basis. That creates distrust and an anti-agile culture. Worse, these people and teams don't feel any satisfaction with their products. That's a cultural change. That's why I say agility requires cultural changes.
I started this series with many specific concerns about a particular interview question: “The product owner and dev team cannot decide on a sprint goal, even after hours of discussion. Instead, I see assumptions that reveal a divide-and-conquer, and possibly a command-and-control culture, not an agile culture. Not one person.
In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1 , I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency , where we watch the flow of the work , not the people doing tasks. What about those cultural changes? And once you release regularly, you can deliver and demo that often.
In this part, I’ll discuss an option for a product-oriented organization. Consider a Product-Oriented Organization. Instead of organizing by function, consider a product-oriented organization. Again, I am not saying this is the only way a product organization would look, but this is a possibility. What do you do?
In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1 , I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency, where we focus on watching the work, not the people. The goal to release the product. When the team can focus on the product, as a cross-functional team, they can create some agility.
Example 1: Startup/Small Organization with Few Products. They offer their product in two versions: Pro and Lite. The first was not waiting for the end of an iteration to demo or release. They demo'd every week on Wednesday mornings and then they released after the demo. Let's start with a couple of examples. Others mob.
I asked Brad these questions: Do you have product or feature teams that are cross-functional and can release alone? ( Component teams create interdependencies and take much more time to finish work.). Does each team focus on just one product at a time? Schedule Variance Does Not Make Sense for Software Products.
Once the team completes that highest priority feature(s), the team can release the product. When we release, we can regroup and figure out what to do next for this product. Fork another product. (I I did this with several Lite vs Pro products using this approach.). See and demo the product as it grows.
If you're creating products of any kind—especially software products—you've got a team sport. Successful software product development is about how well the team learns together. The better the team learns together, the better the product is. See Product Orientation Requires Technical Excellence ).
When organizations lack a formal innovation pipeline process, project approvals tend to be based on who has the best demo or slides, or who lobbies the hardest. There is no burden on those who proposed a new idea or technology to talk to customers, build minimal viable products, test hypotheses or understand the barriers to deployment.
We had (and still have) too many products to keep the same teams on them for a long time. For programs, the team stayed together and moved to a different feature set/internal product until the program finished. We could move to a new product and/or a new team. My job was to smooth the way for people to deliver products.
Once our customers saw demos, they wanted to change things. ” One of the customers realized he wanted something different—something we didn't expect for this product. That means you can replan the project or the product. See the product come together, depending on how you approach the prototyping.
When you ask this question, you might learn what some of my clients learned: Sometimes, managers wanted to know when it was safe to announce the product. ” I thought it was reasonable to use data to be able to announce the product. I like demos to know when if we're on track. Demos can tell us if we've done enough.
The first is that Brooks strongly suggested the idea of a “surgical team” That hierarchical team was a feature- or product-based team. Ten people, seven of them professionals, are at work on the problem, but the system is the product of one mind–or at most two, acting uno animo.”
Your customers can't take your product more often than once or twice a year. Because the product doesn't need to leave the building, the teams don't release internally. Nor do the teams demo on a regular basis. What if we thought of all these people as customers: The various people who buy the product. Colleagues?).
Because your context is unique to you, your team, project, product, and culture. And, with any luck, nudges the culture in a good direction for your team, project, and product. Why Do You Want an Agile Culture for Your Product? Notice I said the culture is for this particular product.
” When we have insufficient trust, morale and the products deteriorate. Instead, we can extend trust and keep innovating for morale and the products. Two of them are the product backlog burnup and the feature chart in Velocity is Not Acceleration. Ask for a regular cadence of demos, too.
If you're creating products of any kind—especially software products—you've got a team sport. Successful software product development is about how well the team learns together. The better the team learns together, the better the product is. See Product Orientation Requires Technical Excellence ).
To account for its success, many point to America’s entrepreneurial culture, its tolerance for failure and its unique ecosystem of venture funding. So for companies looking to create revolutionary products, identifying and accessing cutting edge, exploratory research is a key competitive advantage. ” We need to move faster.
This post is about what you can do to create an agile culture, regardless of where you are in the organization. BTW: One more thing about an agile culture: Many of the people I spoke with at the conference are convinced they need to “scale.” And, they change the culture to one that supports agile approaches.
For years, we've used several metaphors to describe software product development: People-based metaphors, such as: Man-weeks for all the humans working on a project or a product. Demo inside the organization. In product development, is it anyone's job to make a baby at work? Yes, those people might also plan together.
They are hard to do in a company that excels at products. While Steve Jobs ran Apple, he drove the vision but put strong operating execs in each domain – hardware, software, product design, supply chain, manufacturing – who translated his vision and impatience into plans, process, and procedures.
Dan Lyons’s book Disrupted is an often-delightful tour through startup culture, based on the author’s experience working at online marketing firm HubSpot. Despite taking the faux-curmudgeonly attitude of an anthropologist exploring the strange world of business dudes — is a sales funnel really that much of a novelty?
And because every sales team has a unique sales strategy, culture, solution, and definition of winning, the best sales playbooks are unique to each organization and target buyer persona. Sales Culture. Do not underestimate the need for the right sales culture to meet your targets. Sales Talent.
Maybe you want to use this project as a way to integrate a team into a new product or a new domain. Project lifecycles and cultures manage all those risks. And, you can decide if you want to try to change the culture. Or, you might only need informal demos to show people where you are. You'd like to experiment.
The closer to the left your products are, the more your managers might be open to changing their behaviors and the culture. TL; DR: “Stop making it harder” is a culture problem. However, note that the corporate Culture (Big-C-Culture) was that they could take advantage of women. The closer to the right?
Some of the dysfunction was due to the culture, which discouraged collaboration. That's when the culture of experience spat in my face. Culture Trumps Everything Up until I arrived, the “team” culture was anti-collaboration. Then, senior management offered kudos when we showed a demo.
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