Author Archives: Chris Sims

The Agile Manifesto For Complex Work

Work team collaborating in an office.When Agile Learning Labs started in 2007, our focus was helping organizations find “a better way to better software.” We taught and coached software product development organizations how to apply scrum and related agile practices. We used the Manifesto For Agile Software Development as a reference for what it means to develop software in an agile way.

Today, we often work with organizations that do other kinds of complex work: marketing, research, bio-tech, even architecture. What would the Agile Manifesto look like if it was generalized to describe doing any kind of complex work in an agile way? With the help of participants in my regular online open office hours, I’ve generalized the values and principles from The Manifesto For Agile Software Development, so that they might better apply to any type of complex work.
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Testing Product Hypotheses Before Implementation

We’ve described how to use product hypotheses to measure the value of what a scrum team has built. We’ve also explored how to test product hypotheses more quickly by only building a minimum viable product (MVP). Now let’s look at ways to test those product hypotheses before the scrum team builds anything, using product discovery techniques.
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Testing Product Hypotheses With A Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

Image of blocks showing the letters MVPA previous article described how a scrum team could measure the value delivered by completed product backlog items. The approach is based on creating a product hypothesis for each item, describing how the value will be measured. By implementing an item (user story) and then measuring the results, the team is conducting an experiment to validate their beliefs about the value of the item.

A minimal viable product (MVP) allows us to implement less than the full feature, and still gather data about how valuable users find it. While an MVP is often used to test an entire product idea, the approach can also be used to test new feature areas of an existing product. An MVP is a simple implementation that allows us to gather real data from our users. Read the full article…

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Measuring Value With Product Hypotheses

Photo by Hans Reniers

A scrum team’s product owner and stakeholders believe that each item in the team’s product backlog is valuable and should be built. There is evidence that suggests that these beliefs are often incorrect. According to a 2019 study, 80 percent of features in the average software product are rarely or never used.

Sadly, most teams never measure the value of what they create, and thus they continue to invest in building those aspects that aren’t delivering value. Measuring value allows the product owner to direct the team’s focus toward the 20 percent of features that hold most of the value. Read the full article…

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How To Create A User Persona

Young woman with suitcase and palm trees in the background

Photo by Tyler Nix

A user persona is a fictional character that represents a real group of product stakeholders, most often a market segment of end users or customers. A persona is generally based on user research and incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of the stakeholders represented by that persona. User personas can help a product owner communicate more effectively with their scrum team and the team’s stakeholders.

Here’s how to create a persona to represent a group of users, customers, or other stakeholders of your team’s product. Read the full article…

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Tips For Your Agile Job Search

Three people searching with telescopes.Are looking to get an agile job, such as scrum master, product owner, or developer on a scrum team? I recommend using scrum to structure your job search. A job search is complex work, full of unknown unknowns. That’s exactly the sort of work that scrum is good for. Additionally, using scrum and related agile techniques to structure your job search will grow your agile knowledge and skills. Here are a few thoughts on how to use scrum to support your agile job search.
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Strategic Planning For Scaled-Up Scrum: An Overview

Here’s an overview of one approach to doing strategic planning in a scaled-up scrum environment. We’ll use twelve weeks as our planning horizon, though the approach works fine for shorter periods as well. We’ll start by looking at how a single team could plan for such a time horizon on their own without considering the broader organizational context, and build up from there.
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