Slides Ari Tiktin recently used in his discussion w/ mentees of The Product Mentor. The Product Mentor is a program designed to pair Product Mentors and Mentees from around the World, across all industries, from start-up to enterprise, guided by the fundamental goals…Better Decisions. Better Products. Better Product People. Throughout the program, each mentor leads a conversation in an area of their expertise that is live streamed and available to both mentee and the broader product community.

1. Introducing Agile to Product
Teams
By Ari Tiktin
November 8, 2013

2. Why even consider Agile?
Waterfall is a dominant software
development methodology

3. Waterfall can be expensive…and slow

4. Agile offers an alternative approach

5. Agile is beneficial to product teams
• Greater visibility into progress of a release
• More flexibility to deal with changes
• Higher quality software

6. The Agile Manifesto
We are uncovering better ways of developing software
by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work
we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

7. There are many Agile methods
•
•
•
•
•
Extreme Programming
Scrum
Kanban
“Scrumban”
Many more…..
Let’s talk about Scrum in more detail

8. This is Scrum in a nutshell

9. The Scrum Team is critical to success

10. These are the Scrum phases

11. The User Story is the requirement
Priority
Effort
BusinessValue

12. INVEST as a user story guideline
6 attributes of a good user story
•
•
•
•
•
•
Independent
Negotiable
Valuable
Estimable
Small
Testable

13. Release management & planning

14. Using Planning Poker cards is a popular
way to estimate stories

15. An example of a burn down chart

16. An example of a task board

17. How should you get started?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Start small
Get a rock star team
Have a product vision & strategy
Have a release plan or release schedule
Create a product backlog
Prioritize the backlog
Hire an
Pick an iteration length
Agile Coach
Estimate the story
if you can
Track your velocity

18. Prioritization spreadsheet example

19. Obstacles to Agile team performance
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Absence of trust
Blaming each other for failure
Duplicative work
Skipping standup
Missing sprint goals
Unit tests pass but things are still broken
Need a clean-up iteration

20. Some common issues with Agile
•
•
•
•
User experience design can suffer
Feature chasing
Lack of perceived predictability
Engineers feeling like they are losing their ability
to contribute more than code
• Architecture and technical debt may not get the
attention needed
• Marketing, sales, customer service brought in too
late to prepare

21. Dual-Track agile may help

22. Which Agile process to use?
Agile
Team
Complexity
Requirements
Culture
Time to
Market
Small
Low to
medium
Dynamic
Empowered
Fast
Small to
medium
Medium
Dynamic
Empowered
Fast
Feature
Driven
Development
Medium to
large
Medium /
high
Moderate
changes
Empowered
Medium
Agile Unified
Process
Medium to
large
High
Moderate
changes
Command &
Control
Medium /
Long
Large
High
Stable
Command &
Control
Long
XP
Scrum/Lean
Traditional

23. In Agile, the product manager still
needs to lead
•
•
•
•
•
•
Have a vision and a roadmap
Be the expert
Make the tough decisions
Protect the team
Act with integrity
Motivate those around you

24. Some popular Agile software tools
•
•
•
•
•
•
Jira
Rally
Pivotal Tracker
Trello
LeanKit
Swift Kanban
Some teams still use physical boards and post-it
notes or index cards

25. Any questions?