7 Deadly Agile Sins of a Startup Company

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrath

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

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

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 –