lean on agile: getting the best of both worlds

Lean On Agile

Getting the Best of Both Worlds

About Me

● 17 years in Silicon Valley.

● Tech background: Titles like VP of Engineering and CTO

● Early adopter of both Agile, Kanban, and Lean Startup.

● Worked on 6 startups.

● Coached dozens of enterprise product and tech teams.

● Wrote a book on startups: startuppatterns.com.

About Blackwillow Studios

The next chapter in my ongoing adventure in tech product innovation…

● Leveraging methods we developed at Neo.● Picking up where consulting left off.● Teaching large organizations how to

develop products like a startup.

Why Agile or Lean?

Why Agile?

Going digital means you are now a software company.

Software companies employ Agile. Why?

● Flexibility: Requirements don’t need to be planned in advance.● Cost: Agile encourages modular design. Changes to the software are cheaper.● Recruitment: Engineers are attracted to good software development practices.

Why Lean Startup?

Because Lean Startup allows you to learn from customers… FAST!!

● Learning: Lean Startup generates knowledge about the market quickly and cheaply (relatively).● Validation: Helps make sure you’re building the right thing.● Alignment: Aligns your Agile product development to overall business goals.

How fast is fast, exactly?

A quarterly product update generates new knowledge about the customer 90x slower than a daily update.

And most startups actually ship new versions multiple times per day!

So, a typical startup can iterate on a product with real customers 100 times between two quarterly releases of an enterprise competitor’s product in the same market.

Quick aside...“Lean” is not “Lean Startup”

Lean product development is concerned with optimizing the overall value chain. Think: continuous improvement, workflows, Kanban, etc.

Lean Startup is the use of experiments to reduce risk about the market for a proposed product or service.

The Team

Importance of Team Structure

● Cross-functional● Dedicated● Colocated

You must have at least two out of three!

Team StructureWhy Cross-functional?

Cross-functional teams create better products than teams organized into functional silos.

The feedback loops are tighter, and so there is less rework and less miscommunication.

Team StructureWhy Dedicated?

Tacit knowledge develops over time, and can't really be measured or taught.

A team that grows its tacit knowledge can do more in less time and avoid more mistakes.

Team StructureWhy Co-located?

Co-located teams develop better bonds of trust with their teammates.

There are faster feedback loops, more quick, informal decision making, and fewer meetings.

Team size affects the volume of communication.

A team of size n means that there are n(n-1)/2 possible communication paths between one team member and any other team member.

● A team of 3 people = 3 communication paths.● A team of 4 people = 6 communication paths.● A team of 5 people = 10 communication paths.● A team of 8 people = 28 communication paths.● A team of 15 people = 105 communication paths.

Optimal team size is between 5 and 8 people. And 8 people is still pushing it!

The Culture

Importance of Team Culture

● Everyone on the team is values-aligned.

● The vision and strategy are crystal clear.

● Safe-to-fail experimentation is encouraged.

Importance of Team Culture

● Establish team working agreements at the beginning.

● Have retrospectives frequently.

● Encourage direct, and honest communication.

Also, co-location makes culture development easier.

The Process

Customer DevelopmentValidate your assumptions

State hypotheses before designing experiments.

Everyone on the team talks to customers.

One at a time. No focus groups.

KanbanMake all work visible

Use a visual system for all work.

Do only one thing at a time.

Measure cycle time, not utilization.

CadenceDaily, Weekly, Monthly

Daily stand-ups.

Weekly planning.

Monthly retrospectives.

Track ProgressUser Stories or Experiments?

Experiments on a weekly cadence.

User stories to build the experiment’s features.

Measure both speed and learning.

The Tools

Give them MacsStartups use open source, cloud,

and modern frameworks.

Slack and other tools speed communication.

Cloud services are fast and easy to build and tear down.

Dev-Ops enables rapid, continuous deployment.

Metrics dashboards keep the team on track.

In the wild...

Approaches to Lean + Agile

● Nesting Lean Startup tactics inside your Agile sprints.

○ User stories drive interviews or other experiments. Can be muddy, confusing.

● Nesting Agile inside your Lean Startup loop.

○ Better, but tends to embed “prototype” code in production by accident or urgency (tech debt).

● The “dual track” or “bi-modal” approach.

○ Entirely separate team for innovation versus team for scaling proven ideas.

○ Slow, lots of information lost between teams, plus tendency to over-engineer solution.

Talk to us. We can help

Blackwillow Studios

Popup Incubators

Corporate Innovation Centers & Ecosystems

Innovation Assessments

Blackwillow Labs & Training

Use incubators to rapidly test ideas.

“Graduated” ideas that pass the incubator are spun out or spun in as new businesses.

Scale these businesses in the same way that you would scale any startup.

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Don’t hand newly formed teams and ideas back to operational teams! Keep them apart.

Our Approach