7 Deadly Agile Sins of a Startup Company

7 Deadly Agile Sins of a Startup Company

Pride

Opportunity Cost: Learn how and when to effectively say “No” to the business.

Under promise, over deliver

Pride: What didn’t work?

Data Driven Decisions Product Councils Miscommunications of priority changes

Pride: Defining a cultureWorking within the dynamic culture “mind like water” Anti-Fragile: adopting processes for robustness

Buy a FeatureInnovation Games Learned via Agile Velocity Product Owner TrainingUnderstand what’s truly important Learn to do it virtually with multiple stakeholders Make it easy

Gluttony: Lessons in Defining Minimum

Viable Ship

Temptation into gluttony is a plethora of features and capabilities all that promise to bring about the customers to love us…. But less in this case is more.

Gluttony: What didn’t work

Large Epics and stories that were never broken down Lack of subject matter expertise or training on new capabilities Too many assumptions Too few conflicts or getting comfortable with conflict resolution

GluttonyLearning to under promise, over deliver Learning to say “no” effectively and challenge the assumptions productively Resurrect backlog grooming and iterative story development for estimation

Sloth

Dress it up, dress it down… not making time for refactoring can cripple your product

Sloth: What we learnedAttempting to introduce process to slow down resulted in bypassing process Quality improvement activities to refactor ended up in being rushed due to new commitments / business needs

Sloth: Why such a resistance to refactoring? Keep an eye to sustaining and maintaining workDocument as you go … otherwise you spend more time supporting code when you’ve moved onto other projects stalling velocity

GreedWith just this one more feature, the customers will come….

Greed is good… or is it?Lean out the product by removing unused features to ease maintenance and sustainabilityWhen adopting new features account for continued delivery of it Strategies for keeping current with integration product revisions

LustLust: Intense Desire

If you build it “easy to use” they will come: - Design Firms and UX - User Interface Complexity - Wholesale site redesign versus

iterative development

Lust: Lessons LearnedDevelop a user testing practice Understand what actual users use and value Iterate to make the actual users lives easier Challenge your assumptions Become deeply passionate about your users

Wrath

Wrath: What didn’t work

Attempting to chase new customers to the exclusion of current customers Assuming customers were self-managing Individual ticket management of enhancement requests

WrathOrganizational commitment to customers through account management and support Dedication to sustaining efforts to enhance customer experience Understand and quantify value of solutionWhat’s next: FAB and customer workshops to quantify enhancements and fixes at a larger scale Online Voting of customer needs and market information visible to all customers

Envy

EnvyRegular and routine sprint demos to build customer validation Regular and routine field development calls to jointly align priorities and help them understand what we’re building and why KISS –