7 Deadly Agile Sins of a Startup Company

1. 7 Deadly Agile Sins of a Startup Company

2. Pride Opportunity Cost: Learn how and when to effectively say “No” to the business. Under promise, over deliver

3. Pride: What didn’t work? • Data Driven Decisions • Product Councils • Miscommunications of priority changes

4. Pride: Defining a culture • Working within the dynamic culture • “mind like water” • Anti-Fragile: adopting processes for robustness

5. Buy a Feature • Innovation Games • Learned via Agile Velocity Product Owner Training • Understand what’s truly important • Learn to do it virtually with multiple stakeholders • Make it easy

6. Gluttony: Lessons in Defining Minimum Viable Ship Temptation into gluttony is a plethora of features and capabilities all that promise to bring about the customers to love us…. But less in this case is more.

7. Gluttony: What didn’t work • Large Epics and stories that were never broken down • Lack of subject matter expertise or training on new capabilities • Too many assumptions • Too few conflicts or getting comfortable with conflict resolution

9. Gluttony • Learning to under promise, over deliver • Learning to say “no” effectively and challenge the assumptions productively • Resurrect backlog grooming and iterative story development for estimation

10. Sloth Dress it up, dress it down… not making time for refactoring can cripple your product

11. Sloth: What we learned • Attempting to introduce process to slow down resulted in bypassing process • Quality improvement activities to refactor ended up in being rushed due to new commitments / business needs

12. Sloth: • Why such a resistance to refactoring? • Keep an eye to sustaining and maintaining work • Document as you go … otherwise you spend more time supporting code when you’ve moved onto other projects stalling velocity

13. Greed With just this one more feature, the customers will come….

14. Greed is good… or is it? • Lean out the product by removing unused features to ease maintenance and sustainability • When adopting new features account for continued delivery of it • Strategies for keeping current with integration product revisions

15. Lust • Lust: Intense Desire • If you build it “easy to use” they will come: • Design Firms and UX • User Interface Complexity • Wholesale site redesign versus iterative development

17. Lust: Lessons Learned • Develop a user testing practice • Understand what actual users use and value • Iterate to make the actual users lives easier • Challenge your assumptions • Become deeply passionate about your users

18. Wrath

19. Wrath: What didn’t work • Attempting to chase new customers to the exclusion of current customers • Assuming customers were self-managing • Individual ticket management of enhancement requests

20. Wrath • Organizational commitment to customers through account management and support • Dedication to sustaining efforts to enhance customer experience • Understand and quantify value of solution • What’s next: FAB and customer workshops to quantify enhancements and fixes at a larger scale • Online Voting of customer needs and market information visible to all customers

21. Envy

22. Envy • Regular and routine sprint demos to build customer validation • Regular and routine field development calls to jointly align priorities and help them understand what we’re building and why • KISS –