Agile + DevOps Virtual 2020 - Product Ownership
Monday, June 8
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics,...
Tuesday, June 9
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
Wednesday, June 10
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
The How and Why of Full-Service Ownership
High-performing software development teams are focused on customers and taking greater ownership of their production stack. The tricky part is teaching these teams how to tackle the operational challenges that come with full-service ownership. Julie Gunderson will discuss how to implement a model where development teams are both empowered to own their full-stack production deployments and equipped to manage common software lifecycle operational issues like reducing alert fatigue and learning from failures.
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,...
Delivering Agile Results on a Fixed-Scope Contract
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? In this case, the immovable object is a contract with extensive requirements embedded in the scope and no flexibility for leveraging agile methods. The unstoppable force is the agile delivery team determined to find a way to make agile methods work, even with this seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Iterative waterfall delivery against a predefined scope goes against everything agile stands for. The solution is a combination of proven strategies to transform this rigid contract into an agile platform for delivering the highest-...
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...
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Coaching Is the Product: Build and Measure Your Product Context
When we talk about products in agile, we typically think of software. But any product or service can benefit from agile. If you are struggling to make that mental shift from software products to delivering a customer-focused service, this is the session for you. Tricia Bailey and John Eisenschmidt will show how to use agile to establish a coaching office and lead your transformation by "sipping your own agile champagne." Learn how to use product definition tools and practices, sprinkle agile principles throughout, and cultivate healthy, self-organizing teams.