Driving Lean Innovation in Agile Teams

1. Driving Lean Innovationin Agile Teams Presented by Arlen Bankston Arlen.Bankston@LitheSpeed.com @abankston, @lithespeed

2. About Me Arlen Bankston • Co-Founder of LitheSpeed, LLC • User experience & product development background • 15 years of Agile experience • Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt • Lately 40% training, 20% each of coaching, product development & management 2

3. Agenda “Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.” Ash Maurya, Lean Entrpreneur, Author of Running Lean. • Sensei Story • Agile Blues, Lean Startup • Lean + Agile Innovation • Holistic Discovery • Risk-Driven Product Backlog • Exploratory Sprints • Data-Driven Sprint Review • Lean & Agile at Established Companies

4. Sensei Story http://www.senseitool.com

5. First, an Idea! A tool to facilitate Continuous Improvement via the Scrum Retrospective Sensei is an Agileretrospective tool by LitheSpeed. www.senseitool.com

6. Quickly built a prototype

7. And, we took it on the road

8. Everyone said this was the best thing since…

9. And so… Lost our Team, Got a New Team Built, Built, Built Built some more

10. Build and they will come? Customer Discovery Feature Development

11. Agile Blues, Lean Startup

12. Risks of Agile • Backlog items are not always validated against true end-user needs • Critical reliance on a fallible Product Owner • Lack of clear advice on how and when to “pivot” • IT bias… fall back on what we know: build, build, build

13. Now What? • Solution crafted, few customers • No ideas on how best to proceed • Keep building? • But…we’re almostout of runway!

14. A Serendipitous Epiphany

15. The Lean Startup Cycle: Build-Measure-Learn • Know your customer • Start small • Fail fast • Test relentlessly • Seek customer validation at all levels

16. Lean Discovery + Agile Delivery Illustrated Discovery

17. Holistic Discovery Assessing key customers, problems & markets

18. Iterative Risk Management

19. Test Your Riskiest Assumption • What critical assumptions would sink your business case if untrue? • We assumed that most agile teams did (or at least wanted to do) retrospectives. • Do your teams?

20. Discovering Customer Needs [In]validate your assumptions by: • Interviewing users • Observing users in their native environments • Manually simulating your system (“concierge”) • Rapid usabilitytesting • Tracking behavior of customer cohorts (related groups)

21. Parallel Collaborative Design & the Design Studio 2-3 cycles Design StudioApproach • Benefits: • Rapid idea generation & iteration • Avoid missed opportunities • Buy-in across team(s)

22. Sensei Lean Startup STREAM OF VALIDATED FEATURES Lean Feature Validation & Elaboration Agile Feature Delivery & Release Invalidated

23. LeanCanvas to draft your Business Model Draft your business case in a simple, single-page format, and adjust based upon the results of your interviews, prototypes and releases. Thanks to Ash Maurya, Leanstack.com 23

24. Example Lean Canvas for Sensei

25. Risk-Driven Product Backlog Challenging & testing your assumptions

26. The MVP • A “Minimum Viable Product” might be: • Learning: Onsite observation, fake menus, ads • Pitching: Preorders, comparisons, joint design • Experiencing: Concierge, prototypes • Later releases focus on scaling. • Early releases focus on quickly & cheaply testing ideas. 26

27. Plan Releases & Pivots with a Story Map Epic 1 Epic 2 Key Activity Major Component Story A1 MVP B1 D1 C1 A2 Pivot Key Differentiators C2 C3 A3 B2 D1 Flexibility & Safety D2 Scaling & Optimization B3 27

28. Unbounce for Landing Pages You can create dynamic landing pages that help you tune your pitch and garner pre-orders with tools like Unbounce.

29. Validation Board for Experimentation Plan and track experiments to test your assumptions about customers, problems & solutions. Pivot based upon the results that you see. https://www.leanstartupmachine.com/validationboard/ 29

30. Adjusting the Plan • Based on what you learn, you might: • Stick to the plan • Target another customer group • Target a different need • Expand or contract feature focus • Change platforms or architecture • Change channels • Kill the idea entirely • Persevere, pivot or punt. 30

31. Exploratory Sprints Quick, cheap ways to validate your approach

32. Concierge to Test without Coding • A manual simulation of your product or service.

33. Overcoming the fear of being “Salesy”

34. BalsamiqMockups for Low-Fi Prototyping Test layouts and flows without coding or graphic design. http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/

35. Data-Driven Sprint Review Using data to drive decisions

36. Lean Canvas as Dynamic Dashboard Think of your project as a set of small experiments. The results of these experiments should be simply stated and reviewed regularly to guide decisions about product direction. Thanks to Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean: http://www.runningleanhq.com/

37. “Pirate” Metrics & Customer Funnels How many users are interested and find you?Preorders, signups, ad responses How is their experience when they do?Successful runs through key use case Do they stick around for the long run?30, 60, 90 day retention by cohort Do they pay? Ratio of paying users or ROI Do they tell their friends? Successful recommendations Thanks to Dave McClurehttp://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version

38. Validating Product Increment Analyzing & evolving your production system

39. Quantitative A/B & Multivariate Testing Split (A/B) testing randomly presents users with competing versionsof specific application pages and features. • See what works best by running parallel experiments • Choose the winning option after appropriate time A B Header Story Demo movie Sign up form 58% of visitors signed up 35% of visitors signed up Header Sign up form Demo movie Story

40. A/B Testing Sensei with Optimizely We found a 60% increase in registrations just from adding the term “distributed teams” to our landing page.

41. ZopimLive Chat We envisioned live chat to be largely a help tool, but it ended up connecting us with our most passionate early adopters.

42. Watching users in action

43. Lean & Agile at Established Companies

44. Challenges to Innovation at Large Corporations • Talent • Heavy Governance • Heavy duty consumer research processes • Decision culture centered around HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) • Success measured as # of units • Culture that frowns upon pivots

45. Lean for the Enterprise atCapital One* • We hire only the best digital talent and then massively empower them • We have designed new workplace environments to spark innovation • We have retooled the way we do consumer insights generation • We don’t create business cases first - We build and test prototypes to create the business case • We build concierge based solutions before we build the technology • We measure success as customer engagement rather than unit production *GaganKanjlia, Senior Vice President, Capital One Bank

46. Thank You!

47. Reading List – Lean & Agile Innovation • Running Lean – Maurya • Essential Scrum – Rubin • The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development – Vlaskovits • The Lean Startup – Ries • Discover to Deliver – Gottesdiener • The Other Side of Innovation – Govindarajan • Four Steps to the Ephiphany– Blank • Business Model Generation – Osterwalder

48. Contact Us for Further Information Arlen Bankston Executive Vice President Arlen.Bankston@LitheSpeed.com On the Web: http://www.lithespeed.com http://www.senseitool.com "I only wish I had read this book when I started my career in software product management, or even better yet, when I was given my first project to manage. In addition to providing an excellent handbook for managing with agile software development methodologies, Managing Agile Projects offers a guide to more effective project management in many business settings." John P. Barnes, former Vice President of Product Management at Emergis, Inc.