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InfoQ Homepage Podcasts Dave West on Agile beyond Software, Organisational Alignment and How Product Ownership is Hard

Dave West on Agile beyond Software, Organisational Alignment and How Product Ownership is Hard

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In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO of scrum.org about agile beyond software, the need for organisational alignment and how product ownership is a major inhibitor for many organisations because it is not done well.

Key Takeaways

  • Agile ideas are taking root beyond software development, in business areas and in complex engineering environments 
  • The scope of agility is more than just delivering great product – it is delivering great product, getting great feedback, experimentation and learning
  • The large consulting firms have the relationships at the most senior levels to enable top-down change in organisations
  • Most software teams today are delivering relatively well, however there is misalignment between the delivery teams and the wider organisation’s ability to accept and release product to the market effectively
  • Good product ownership is incredibly hard and most organisations do product ownership very badly 

Show Notes

  • 00:34 Introductions 
  • 01:02 The move of agile ideas beyond software teams
  • 01:15 The use of Scrum for marketing
  • 01:36 How agile approaches are being used in complex engineering environments that go beyond software (SpaceX, Tesla, BMW, Toyota …)
  • 02:04 The core is the importance of delivering value to customers
  • 02:10 The scope of agility is more than just delivering great product – it is delivering great product, getting great feedback, experimentation and learning
  • 02:25 The merger of ideas like Lean Startup and LeanUX with agile approaches
  • 02:52 The large consulting firms such as McKinsey & Boston Consulting are now driving agile adoptions in larger enterprises via their access to the most senior executives  
  • 03:32 “New Ways of Working” as a label for agile adoption at scale
  • 04:04 The need to focus on outcomes to help prevent agile-in-name-only transformations 
  • 04:10 Moving away from thinking about outcomes in terms of plan-budget-risk towards customer value
  • 04:25 Until organisation make this change in focus, nothing else will fundamentally change
  • 04:47 Referring to Calota Perez’s work on the ages of technological change and the changes needed to enable real transformation 
  • 05:18 The large consulting firms have the relationships at the most senior levels to enable top-down change in organisations 
  • 05:56 The world is full of complex problems; solving these problems needs effective teams, and scrum is the predominant way in which teams are organised to be effective today 
  • 06:28 Scrum.org continuing to build bridges into the wider community of ideas such as with Kanban and LeanUX 
  • 06:40 Bring out ideas around leadership and the relationship with Management 3.0
  • 06:51 Trying to build a more consistent, systematic approach to solving complex problems
  • 07:04 The growth in the scrum.org community 
  • 07:30 Scrum.org has been focused on helping organisations, teams and teams of teams solve complex problems 
  • 07:40 Changes coming to the scrum.org content and post-class support infrastructure 
  • 08:02 Building more community and the need to improve coaching 
  • 08:28 Summarizing research done with McKinsey into agile personalities 
  • 08:46 One of the most important characteristics for effective teamwork is agreeableness 
  • 08:57 “Yes, and” rather than “yes, but” 
  • 09:08 The way a good coach facilitates getting to “yes, and” behaviours in a group and how that contributes to delivering value
  • 10:04 The historic gaps in the adoption of scrum approaches – Martin Fowler’s Flaccid Scrum 
  • 10:27 Most software teams today are delivering relatively well, however there is misalignment between the delivery teams and the wider organisation’s ability to accept and release product to the market effectively
  • 10:46 Problems with the way in which we manage work
  • 10:54 Align teams to outcomes and customers rather than to projects and silos
  • 11:24 The gaps are around organisational alignment, funding approaches
  • 11:59 The need to think differently about risk 
  • 12:14 The need for more professionalism in the agile community 
  • 12:18 The number of people who call themselves agile coaches with no background or training in the discipline of coaching 
  • 12:41 Professionalizing the industry is hard 
  • 12:50 Identifying “what makes a good ……” is difficult to define
  • 13:14 The mess in the industry around the role of product ownership 
  • 13:31 Most organisations have an inability to empower people to make decisions
  • 13:34 The skills of product ownership are really, really difficult 
  • 14:08 Product ownership is where the gaps all come together and it’s a hard job
  • 14:48 The contentious relationship between the product community and the scrum community
  • 15:06 The original title for the Product Owner role was Agile Product Manager
  • 15:13 The rationale for the change to Product Owner and the need for empowerment in that role
  • 15:48 Exploring aspects of product ownership and some of the disfunctions that can come about
  • 16:36 Making the decisions about what’s in and what’s out in a product is hard
  • 17:14 Drawing on the very tangible practices from LeanUX to help the product owner and the team make better decisions about priorities 
  • 17:47 Reasons why having Personas on the Team Wall is a good practice 
  • 18:35 Personas give us a clear view of purpose – why are we building this product for who? 
  • 19:01 A story of clear purpose at a pharmaceutical event
  • 19:48 The value of metrics that make sense for product ownership 
  • 20:15 Product ownership is the place where organisational disfunctions manifest themselves
  • 21:10 Advice for technical leaders – 
    • Alignment and clarity around what the teams should be focused on – a clear vision that defines success in terms of outcomes and goals 
    • Stop having all the answers and start asking questions – talk to understand, don’t talk to win
  • 22:05 Solving complex problems needs super-smart people working together and it’s hard
  • 22:34 We can fix all the big complex problems in the world, if we get amazing groups of people to work together
  • 22:58 Build an organisation around you that is ultimately kind
  • 23:11 Ask your team every day “who have you helped?” 

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