Learning faster: Scrum's compatibility with Lean UX, Lean Startup, Design Thinking and other discovery elements
What do these items have in common? Most speak of cross-functional collaboration, and a few outright refer to XP as the best set of current working technical practices. This talk assumes you've got the XP/Scrum iterative development engine running, maybe even with DevOps and continuous development going.
What’s next? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to talk to people that will use the solution? Even on some internal thing like a Salesforce integration? What outcomes really matter to your users? Given that unused features (which there seems to be lots of) provide no value, what’s the least amount that can be done to assure what gets released, gets used?
The Scrum/XP development engine is the delivery track. How you’re learning to quickly deliver the right outcomes, the fuel for that engine, is the discovery track. Coined by some as Dual-Track Scrum, these tracks are meant to run in parallel for each and every Scrum team, all the time.
Why would you want to do that? As one CTO in the health care industry put it to me, he had a few people on a product innovation council, and has a few hundred in product development. Building more, at a faster rate, with Scrum to him seemed a waste of time if nobody used it. Ideas were also stalling in the council’s New Product Introduction process. He saw dual-track as a better way to serve the customers and their needs.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
- A brief run-through of Scrum with improvement tips and tricks
- Illustrating how to wrap Scrum delivery with discovery
- Walk-through of several different discovery techniques, with real-world examples
- Gotchas to look out for when supplementing Scrum delivery with discovery
- Q&A
Learning Outcome
After this session you will be able to:
- Define the term product discovery
- Describe the questions that discovery seeks to answer for software product development
- Identify the key roles and responsibilities for collaborative product ownership
- Compare and contrast the effectiveness of a single product owner with that of collaborative ownership
- Describe techniques to connect teams directly to customers and users
- Identify ways to visualize product and feature ideas
- Describe aspects and elements of product discovery
- Discuss why a team should perform discovery
- Illustrate how discovery can be incorporated in to the Scrum framework
Target Audience
user experience, product management, software development
Rohit Arora
Sergey Shishkin
Naresh Jain
Riju
Stanly Lau
