Présented by Julia Västrik (Scoro Software) at Agile en Seine on September 19, 2023 Who is responsible for innovation? People with a word “Innovation” in their job title, like Innovation managers in Innovation Hubs? Certainly, these people can be innovation catalysts. Still the vast potential of very intelligent, creative, and educated people, who could contribute to the company’s innovations on an everyday basis, stays mostly unused. Usually, these people have a Software Engineer job title. Over the last two decades agile way of working became prevailing within many cross-functional teams in the software development industry. However, most of those teams can be called cross-functional just so far, as what they are mostly doing is just transforming a set of requirements received from outside, usually from stakeholders, into working software. In more progressive companies the decision-making regarding product has moved from stakeholders to product managers and eventually it is moving to the whole cross-functional teams, still such mindset shift is not that common. During this session we will explore what are the benefits of placing product discovery inside the cross-functional team using the great potential of all its members, discuss how to encourage Software Engineers to participate in Product Discovery and learn practical tools how to start embracing the whole team innovation mindset.

1. The Whole Team Approach to
Innovation
Julia Västrik, Agile Coach @ Scoro
Tallinn, Estonia

2. Farfra

4. Some Facts About Estonia
Population:
1.365 million
The most startups and unicorns per capita in
Europe
E-Estonia:
99% state services online
Online voting since 2003 (in 2023 more than
50% votes were online)

5. Since 1. July 2022

6. The Whole Team Approach to
Innovation

7. Uncertainty
Innovation

8. Innovation Hub
Corporate
Accelerator
Innovation
Manager
Head of
Innovation
Chief Innovation
Officer ?

9. Innovative
solutions
Innovative
Company
Disruptive
Innovations

10. And how many of you think that you
work at innovative workplace?

11. When was the last
time when you
personally
participated in
innovation
process?

12. What is Innovation?

13. “Innovation is the practical implementation
of ideas that result in the introduction of
new goods or services or improvement in offering
goods or services.”
–Wikipedia-

14. Who is the source of innovation?

15. People with a word Innovation in their
title?
Facilitators
Catalysts
Coaches Educators

16. Who might be those innovators?

17. Cross-
Functional
Teams
…including
Software
Engineers!
And here they are

19. Cynefin
Product
Development is here
But we often handle
it as it was here
A group of business
experts analyzes a
problem and come
up with a solution
We need to
understand a problem,
ideate,
validate assumptions,
experiment
and learn

20. Product Discovery

21. Roles Accountability
Traditional
->

22. Why involve engineers to Product
Discovery?

23. 1. Diversity of perspectives helps to generate
different ideas
Many different ideas

24. 2. Engineers Often Generate The Best Solutions
Why? Well, maybe not exactly …
However they do have a depth of
knowledge
about what is possible with
technology
But they need to build up a depth of
knowledge about customer context too

25. 3. Engineers Often Ask Disconfirming
Questions
The engineers excel at
seeing the flaws in ideas
It’s a skill they practice
regularly catching errors or
edge cases in their code

26. 4. Engineers Bring an Analytical Mindset to
Product Experiments
They have analytical minds that
help to:
•Craft the experiments
•Evaluate experiment design
•Interpret the results

27. 5. Engineers Can Quickly Assess Technical
Feasibility
“How can we implement this
technically?”

28. 6. Engineers will have more empathy for
customers and feel more engaged

29. How to Start?

30. Build empathy with your customer
Walking in your customer’s
shoes

31. How?
Create
Empathy Map
Talk to real
customer 👀
Understand who is your
customer
(ICP, Persona)

32. Empathy Map

33. How?
Create
Empathy Map
Go to
Call Centre
Talk to real
customer 👀
Watch
user session
recordings
Listen to
user interview
recordings
Observe a colleague
using the product
Understand who is your
customer
(ICP, Persona)

34. Ideate

35. Who is the winner?
?

37. 2 minutes later

38. Prioritise ideas
Ideating &
Impact/Effort Matrix
Just plan
experiments
to validate
No
speculating

39. Plan experiments and execute
Prototypes/MVPs
Fake Door
A/B Testing
Landing Page
etc.

40. Learn
Fail fast
and fail small
It is OK to not get
value sometimes
It is NOT OK to not
learn all the time

41. Possible Objections
“Engineers are too valuable
and expensive resource”
“Should not the engineer
be writing code?”
“They don’t have
time”
“Who will develop?”
By
Management

42. First of all…
?

43. If you call people “resources”
be very careful -
they might call you “overhead”
😜

44. 1. If engineers find out something during Discovery that doesn’t
work out, at least you’ve saved OTHER engineers’ time by NOT
building it.
Regarding the time concerns…
2. It doesn’t take a lot of time:
- In average 1 hour per engineer per week
- Some engineers are involved more, some less

45. Possible Objections
“They don’t understand the
customers’ context”
“Their ideas are not really
viable”
-> Help engineers
understand it
By
Product Manager
(which actually means
“Mines are better”)
-> Plan experiments
and test both ideas
“It is mine!”

46. Possible Objections
-> Socialize Product
Discovery
By
Software Engineers
-> Start small,
one pilot team
“We are here
to write a code!”
-> Find
enthusiasts
-> Educate
-> Help the
engineers realise
that AI will
eventually replace
those who want
just to code
-> Step-by-step

47. Further reading

48. Thank you!
Connect with me on
Votre feedback nous
intéresse !
The Whole Team Approach to Innovation -
EN
—Julia Västrik —
Mardi 19 septembre 2023 15:00
https://roti.express/r/aes2023-24