Picture this: you’ve a breakthrough strategic initiative tied to one of your company-level goals that impacts 10 teams across two product groups, as well as your GTM organization. These are all busy, overloaded teams. Those same 10 teams are also juggling five other initiatives. And the business-as-usual whirlwind. You pull this work into the backlogs/roadmaps …
Agile marketing helps marketing organizations develop better campaigns faster. It helps marketers find sustainable pace and flow in the hectic marketing world by leveraging Scrum and Kanban. Team members act as “Mini CMOs” – thinking cross-functionally and are empowered to deliver results. BUT When there’s a problem or opportunity requiring collaboration with other functions… Agile …
These are interesting times. If you’re an agile practitioner (like me) you’re navigating a lot of uncertainty. What’s the right language? “Should I talk about Agile? Avoid it? Take a contrarian view of it?” “Is Agility better than Agile? Worse?” “Should I talk about SAFe? Scrum? or better to talk about Product?” Agilists are struggling …
It often feels like Continuous Deployment has become a bragging right for a technology organization. “We can deploy 13593 times a day.” “A developer can deploy the product on their first day at work.” “Our pets can deploy to production.” Even more often, I encounter organizations that don’t understand the intent behind being able to …
If you’re a healthcare provider, what is your product? This question surfaces when these organizations try to adopt a Product Operating Model or move from project management to a product-oriented organization (and yes, there’s quite an overlap between these two ) I like to consider this from the perspective of the customer—in this case, the …
Working Software. Done Increments. Two related concepts in the agile world that people trying to leverage Agile/Scrum’s empiricism outside of the software/technology space struggle with. The intent behind these practices is to achieve transparency to validate/invalidate assumptions—you might call it managing based on evidence. The key idea is to get transparency as early and often …
Summary I partnered with Gillette’s R&D and Commercial leadership to leverage Scrum for designing the Gillette Exfoliating Razor. This initiative included several multi-disciplinary teams involving technical, research, and commercial teams collaborating on one scaled Scrum borrowing patterns from the Nexus framework. Using Scrum to quickly learn and validate on the key leap of faith assumptions …
Marketing Backlogs in the Trenches Last week I facilitated a 2-day Agile Marketing workshop for one of my clients. As usual, the discussion about the Marketing Backlog and how to move from a big bang marketing campaign to a more iterative approach via smaller slices of stories was one of the highlights. As usual, I introduce …
