You are a Product Owner working hard to maintain a value-driven product backlog. That means you continually check in with what you mean by value. For us, that means checking in with your customers in new heartfelt ways. What adds value to them? What provides them function, commodity and delight? How can you act in love and service to them? Designing empathy into your product feature sets brings you into a deep relationship with your customers. Design from your head and heart to your customers' head and heart. Fortunately for all of us as product owners, George Kembel and his team at the d.School at Stanford University have been working for a number of years on approaches to help us develop customer empathy and to act on it. Having had the good fortune of working with George and his brother John, we have created a design empathy approach that draws from the d.School work. We have added some of our own brainstorming divergence and convergence approaches for data collection and knowledge massaging. This session affords you the opportunity to learn how to conduct our set of empathy activities: from empathy interviews all the way through a complete problem statement. Interactively in a workshop setting, we'll work in small teams to complete 2 of the steps of the overall process.
Because of Agile and better engineering techniques we have pretty much solved the problem of “delivering” software. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. Now we need to turn our focus to delivering “the right” software – software that makes an impact to the customer.
The answer to building the right software begins with a better understanding of the business opportunity and goals. Best of all, we can do this using a collection of familiar concepts, combined in a powerful new way, bringing a shared and measurable vision to agile product management. This approach is called “Impact Mapping.”
This workshop introduces “Impact Mapping” by demonstrating a collaborative approach to solving the challenge of building the right thing. Breaking into small teams, we will build a sample Impact Map, learn to identify and verify the assumptions you've made, and find new approaches to solving the business problem. We will also discuss using this to measure the output of our effort. Attending participants will receive a handout with a worked example and sample questions and techniques that help lead to a successful mapping session.
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about and practice the techniques to uncover assumptions and motivations about your current project – and ensure your next project makes the right impact on customers and bottom line. Let's help our customers better refine and communicate their goals. Impact Mapping is at the heart of the customer voice because it literally gives voice to their needs. We will see you at IMPACT MAPPING!
A simple, effective technique I learned from hydrological engineers on a software project in Africa can dramatically ease your work of prioritizing stories and make it easier to get funding for your projects. This technique, called Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA), is being used today to help over 30 stakeholders in the 9 riparian countries of the Nile region make cooperative decisions about the use of the water of the Nile. It is equally effective in our corporate environments.
In this session, I talk about different criteria we should consider when prioritizing user stories, including corporate goals, the vision for the direction of the product, and the needs of the customer. These criteria are often in competition; Multi-Criteria Analysis is a technique for resolving conflicts of interest in such a way that all stakeholders know that their voice is heard and their needs understood. MCA replaces a gut-level feeling for what the priorities should be with a scientific process for making decisions. It also ensures the needs of all the stakeholders are heard. Finally, I will discuss how to use MCA to: choose one solution from a list of possible solutions, prioritize a product backlog, and make a strong project proposal. The presentation material is woven throughout a facilitated workshop where we learn MCA by doing it.
In the facilitated workshop we will all be stakeholders reaching agreement on the priorities for a set of user stories. The user stories will be provided; our task will be to use MCA to reach agreement on the priorities of the stories. This hands-on experience allows us to implement the knowledge gained from the presentation. You will leave the session with an effective tool for making cooperative decisions in your company.
Even today, to the detriment of agile success, most organizational cultures remain delivery date-driven—resulting in delivery teams that are not focused on creating value for the customer. So how can we redirect stakeholders, the business, and the project team to concentrate on delivering the greatest value rather than simply meeting dates? Pollyanna Pixton describes the tools she has used in collaboration sessions to help all stakeholders and team members begin the process of adopting customer-centric agile methods. These tools include laying out an end-to-end customer journey, forming reusable decision filters to help prioritize backlogs, converting features into actionable user stories, and developing a solid process for making group decisions and communicating those decisions. Pollyanna shares questions that product owners and managers can use to define the problem while making sure they don't solve the problem. After all, that is the responsibility of the delivery team.
The goal of this process is focused on bringing meaningful thoughts and creating one shared valuable vision. However, the additional value is providing a concrete beginning of moving the culture away from date driven to value driven.
The Tools
