Agile + DevOps Virtual 2020 - Product Ownership Practices
Wednesday, June 10
Measuring Success as a Product Owner
When you are a product owner, you must balance multiple areas of progress. Is your biggest issue to deal with today the product that is being delivered? Does the team have the right information to make progress? Is your customer on board with your methods and plans? What do IT and HR have to do with this? It is hard to know how you are doing or if you are making progress in the right ways. There are already so many other metrics and checks for the rest of the team; what about the product leaders? Cory Bryan will show how he evaluates his current situation, determines some of the areas that...
Saying Yes for All the Wrong Reasons
Part of a product owner’s job is to say no to requests when appropriate. But all too often, product owners will say yes anyway. Why is this? In this interactive session, we will discuss the three main responsibilities of a product owner, dig into the reasons product owners say yes to a request they should say no to, and discuss ways you can help your product owner overcome these challenges. You’ll need to bring a few sheets of blank paper to work on during the session so we can discuss the consequences of product owners saying yes when they should say no. Work in groups to identify the...
Untangling the MVP and Accelerating Product-Market Fit
The MVP, or minimum viable product, plays a critical role in lean product validation. It is the most important test to demonstrate that product-market fit has been achieved. Yet teams are often unclear about what an MVP is and how to prioritize it versus other research options. Lean product management expert Greg Cohen will shed light on the history of the MVP, how it fits into lean product validation, and how different companies approach the MVP in new product introductions, with a mix of B2C and B2B situations and differing market contexts. You will learn a practical definition for an...
Thursday, June 11
From Project to Product: Focusing on Creating Value
Agile and DevOps transformations have been key for speeding up software development via projects. But development is still often segregated from the business, and work is frequently prioritized based on making the project successful, not on what can bring the most value to the business and end-users. Agile and DevOps are not enough; a new approach is needed. Wendy Flowers will discuss why the gap between modern technical practices and the business is causing organizations to fail, and suggest a different way to think about what you're developing. Learn how managing work via the product,...
Think User Stories Are Enough? Think Again!
PreviewSome of the key tenets of the Agile Manifesto are that we should prioritize user interactions over documentation and embrace the fact that requirements will constantly change. This has led to the adoption of user stories as the almost exclusive form of requirements documentation in agile projects. User stories are incredibly valuable in expressing the desires of users in a consistent, simple, and easily understood format. However, Adam Sandman has seen many projects and customers get into trouble by relying on them as the sole type of requirement. Adam will discuss how we can use...
What UX Designers Can Teach Us about Being Better DevOps Practitioners
We often think of UX designers and DevOps practitioners as solving entirely different problems. On the surface, this is true: Designers spend their days generating mock-ups and wireframes, while DevOps teams spend time thinking about code and incident response. Once we look below the surface, though, we find surprising overlap between the worlds of DevOps and design. Jonathan Maltz will explore that overlap and what we can learn when we start to rub some UX design on our DevOps. We’ll start by focusing on design principles such as hierarchy and grouping, and we’ll see how we can apply...
Making Sure Agile Always Delivers Customer Value
Teams are getting good at agile—they learn the ceremonies, they get a good agile coach that tightens performance, and they become a well-oiled machine primed for delivery. But are they delivering value to the customer? In agile, for some teams sprint 0 is assigned to research spikes, to help define the value that the sprint should deliver. But for many teams, there is not even a sprint 0; value delivery should happen constantly. Join Vidya Dinamani and Heather Samarin as they share what they’re seeing in multiple organizations: Teams that are constantly delivering, but their products are...