Product Agility
The world of Product Discovery and Creation is becoming increasingly challenging due to mistakes and missed opportunities that are prevalent in agile teams, large-scale Scrum and all other agile frameworks. History has shown that when organisations try and scale their product development to more than one cross-functional team, mistakes are made that cut short many chances of getting all possible benefits.
The route of this for many is the need for more attention paid to the incredible advancements in Product Management driven by hordes of professional Product People who prove that making their customers happier is not a pipe dream but a hard and fast reality.
This podcast exists to explore all topics related to Product and Agility and Coaching.
How do you marry the agile principles with Product discovery?
Is it really possible to have hundreds of cross-functional teams (or Product Teams) all working from an effectively prioritised single Product Backlog and a dedicated Product Owner?
How can you embrace continuous improvement and empirical process control for your product, people and processes?
Ever wondered how to overcome the problems people face when trying to scale the Product Owner role and how it relates to Product Management and Product Teams?
Baffled by how to define a product in such a way that enables Feature Teams (aka Product Teams) and why doing wrong means you will only ever be stuck with technical teams?
Scrum Teams are not compatible with modern product management techniques.
Want to know what Product Focus means and how the right focus makes creating a shippable product less painful?
Need to get your head around how to blend modern product management techniques with Sprint Planning and Sprint Reviews to achieve Product Increments that cover the entire product?
This podcast's original focus was on Scaling Scrum vs Single-Team Scrum and how organisations can reap the benefits of Scrum when working on a larger product but still keeping a single product backlog. We found many Product People liked what we said, and then the penny dropped. This isn't a podcast about scaling Scrum or the limitations of single-team Scrum.
This podcast is for Product People & agile advocates who coach or get their hands dirty with Product creation.
We promise there is no Taboo topic that we will not explore on your behalf.
We aim to transcend the conversations about a single team, Daily Scrums, Scrum Masters and the double-diamond and bring everyone together into responsible teams dedicated to working on the entire product to make their customers happier and their lives more fulfilling.
Come and join us on our improvement towards perfection, and give us your feedback (we have a strong customer focus, too), and who knows, perhaps we will discover the magic wand that we can wave over all the broken agile and sudo-products to create a more resilient and adaptable future by bringing the worlds of Product, Agility and coaching together.
This podcast has the conversations and insights you need.
Product Agility
Agility as a Chocolate Egg – How Do You Eat Yours??? (With Aisling Finn): Scrum Day London 2024
Scrum Day London is our second conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you more exciting episodes from this renowned event!
As we continue our TalkInTen series, we have a special episode featuring Aisling Finn, a lead Agile coach, who explores the intriguing analogy of "Agility as a Chocolate Egg – how do you eat yours???" and its implications for enterprise agility.
Aisling on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aisling-finn/
Here is the synopsis of Aisling's Talk:
This session will thought provoking as we look at what you may have to consider from an enterprise perspective when looking to increase flow and value at scale.
People are very strategic at how they eat their chocolate egg – they have reason whether they smash it open or crack it in half or break a piece off bit by bit. So to optimise flow we need to look at why and what we want to optimise.
When looking across large scale organisations, any break or change we make will have ripple effects. How people work together is how it all knits together. How do you actually group people together to maximise flow? How do you break down traditional functional silos – or can you?
Like crème eggs, you have to unpick the outer shell to get to the good stuff! This may lead to mess, more questions and a difficult clean up!
Episode Highlights:
- Leadership and Culture: Discover the importance of leadership in driving enterprise agility.
- Processes and Tools: Learn about the tools and processes that can help scale Agile practices effectively.
- Enhancing Collaboration: Understand how to break down silos and foster better collaboration in large organisations.
- Practical Applications: Gain insights into real-world applications of these principles and how they can be implemented.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!
Use code PRODUCTAGILITY24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.
Sheev - https://www.sheev.co.uk
Host Bio
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
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Ben Maynard
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Product Agility Podcast
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Hello and welcome to the Product Agility Podcast. I'm your host Ben Maynard and for the next few days, we have extra special episodes coming to you from Scrum Day London 2024. This event is a beacon for agile enthusiasts and professionals, and I'm thrilled to bring you insights and new ideas from some of the brightest minds in the agile and product community. For those of you who are new to the podcast, the Product Agility Podcast is your go -to resource for practical tips, strategies, and stories from world -class products and agile thought leaders. Our goal is to increase your knowledge and motivation to experiment, so together we can create ever more successful products. Before we dive in, I'd like to thank our sponsor for this episode, Sheave. Sheave is my company, and we specialize in helping organizations simplify, focus, and align through embracing a product mindset. and using Agile as a means to drive success. Whatever your product or Agile challenge, learn about how Sheave can help your organisation thrive or extend out your own Agile journey at www .sheave .co .uk. That's S -H -E -E -V. And to get a whopping 15 % off of all of our courses, use the code PRODUCTAGILITY24 at the checkout. Now we have an exciting line of speakers from Scrum Day London 2024 who will be sharing valuable insights and practical tips for you to experiment with. So grab a pen and paper, perhaps a hot drink, and let's dive into a talking tent. Scrum Day London 2024. I am here with Aisling Finn. I know, I know that's it because we've just spent time. You told me the history of where your name comes from is super interesting. I love to sing. I love it. And people come on the podcast and I get to just learn about names or just try and pronounce names. And I always try my best. And I know you anyway. We've had dealings in the past and it's just so nice to get to meet you in the flesh. It's particularly a conference after you've given your talk as well. And your talk was titled. Agility as a chocolate egg. How do you eat yours? And now, as I understand it, there's a real deep meaning behind the name of this talk, or you just thought of it over at Easter. Could you tell our listeners, everyone's tuning in, giving up their time to do this, to listen to us, a little bit about who you are and your talk. Where did it come from and what did you talk about? Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Ben, for having me here and having this chat. So I'm Aisling Finn, Lead Agile Coach. And I suppose how did I come up with the title? I love all things agility and I love all things chocolate. So, you know, the two combined is just music to my ears. And I suppose, yes, at the time I was very much influenced by the promotional campaign around Cadbury's Cream Egg, How Do You Eat Yours? And I thought, well, that's so applicable to agility and agile journeys. And how do you? do yours. So I suppose what I'm looking at is very much across an enterprise, so especially at scale. What are the key considerations that we need to keep in mind when looking at different elements across large scale organizations? Because choices or decisions that we make at a team level are very different or have huge implications. So it's a bit like when you have your Cadbury's creme egg and no matter what way you try and take off the chocolate, it's going to have a ripple effect. You know, if you crack it too quickly, it's all going to be a big mess. And sometimes, agile transformations can reveal a big mess first that needs to be cleaned up in order then to move forward. So that's, I suppose, the background of where I began to get my initial thoughts for this conference talk. And from there, it just grew. You mentioned during your talk eight themes. Would you mind sharing what those eight, the context around those eight themes and then what those eight themes were? Absolutely. So I suppose the eight themes were first of all leadership and culture, processes and tools, technology, metrics, OKRs, KPIs, organisational structure, customer focus, employee development and governance and compliance. And I suppose they were my basket of eggs, let's say, and the basket that was holding them all together was communication. And that was a key element that enables all of these teams in order to really ensure that you're actually engaging in an enterprise agility journey. Lovely metaphor, they're lovely visuals in people's minds of a basket full of all these eggs. It made sense to me, the communication had been the basket, because it should be all encompassing. And I think talking to somebody else earlier today during lunchtime about the importance of communication, how it can't be... this side of a desk type activity, it has to be really at the very heart of what you're trying to do and any kind of meaningful change. So when we think about these eight themes and you think about scaling agile, is there a particular prioritization you would give to, or is it nine themes? Is the basket a theme as well? I'll let you answer that in a moment, but is there a particular prioritization or approach you would take when thinking about scaling agile? I suppose just for the context of my talk, I did make a distinction between agile and agility, just first of all. So I suppose Agile in the context of my talk was very much about ways of working, methods, frameworks. Agility is more the larger scale cultural holistic transformation. So it's important, I suppose, for me, when you look at inclusivity, that it's really the agility of the whole enterprise system. Not everyone may be working in Agile methods. So to come back to your point about communication, how do we then enable communication of that across a large scale organization? I'd be very much in coach mode. It depends as the owner of the information that you want to communicate. It is your responsibility to be accountable for, well, if you're sharing information, how do your receivers want to receive it so that your intent is actually landed the way you intended it to? So I'll take just an example. As a leader, you may prefer sending out an email every week. However, your recipients may prefer that they actually see you and hear from you. depending on the type of information you're communicating. But a lot of the time we jump over those fundamentals. We don't have those conversations. We just kind of do what's easy and quick for us. And we forget about actually, we have the responsibility to ensure that it's delivered and that it's received in the way that it's intended. So, you know, a lot of what I spoke about today throughout all of the teams, there was nothing new. It's all fundamental things, but it's just, it's often jump, people dive in a bit like the Cadbury's cream make. you give it to a young child, they'll just wolf it down, they'll throw it into their mouth, and then there's a sheer look of disappointment, because then they'll realize, well, actually, I want to eat it slowly, or actually, I wanted to taste the middle bit, or I wanted to play with it. And that's the same with agility. People dive in into agile methods and frameworks, and they don't take the time to have the conversations around, well, how are we going to make agility work for us as an enterprise system? And so people will be listening to this and thinking about these eight themes, and, I'd maybe be wondering like who is accountable for them? Do we assign a theme to a person? Did you address that in your talk about this as the ownership? Is it per theme, cross theme or anything around there? The ownership and accountability for them? I suppose again, typical coach answer is it's on everyone. And we looked at there are actually officially eight ways, if you want to table quiz answered, eight ways to eat a Cadbury's cream egg officially. Generally there's only three ways people. embrace agility, it's generally top down, bottom up, or a mix of the two. But in any which case, no matter where you start, it is really important that you consider the knock -on implications. So, you know, if you're making decisions and trying to engage in agile ways of working at a team level, well, maybe think ahead and say, well, if we're choosing a tool, for example, is this tool scalable? Is this going to work? It may work for us, maybe three teams. Will it work with 300 teams? And again, it's having that insight and that foresight. to be able to think like that. Again, if you're doing it from top down as a senior leader, if you're, I'm trying to think now, if you're looking at customer focus and really enabling customer centricity, you know, I talk a lot about personas. Well, are people actually looking at the same persona? Are they only looking at their biased perspective of a persona? So often I come across teams and they make their own personas of the end user. they don't engage with maybe a commercial entity or marketing entity that actually has that customer data about the whole persona. So an engineering team will only understand and have biases towards the engineering perspective use of the product. So their persona is going to be very much influenced by that. Whereas procurement or creative will have a very different side of that persona. So it's how do we ensure that we don't have siloed personas of the actual same customer? It reminds me of, and it might have been... I might have in your Shelby was talking to me about this, but the beach ball metaphor, if you've heard of it, see how the beach ball you get with the stripes. And then depending on the perspective, you may look at it and say, it's a yellow ball. it's a red ball. But actually, no, it's a multicolored ball. But it's all depending on our perspective about what we see. Excellent. So time is never on our side when we do these talks on 10, unfortunately. But we are kind of getting towards the end of our time. I know it goes so quick, doesn't it? If there was one tip. you could provide to the listeners based upon your talk, something you think is going to be really valuable for them to take away. What would be that tip? golly, only one. I suppose for me it's leadership and that lines up with this morning some of the talks that I think Marcus had a talk about the top top 10 issues are to do with agile. It definitely comes back to leadership and I think it's ensuring that leaders understand that they need to own and be part of the journey. They need to show that they are willing to change. We talk a lot about, you know, having, are people ready for change? I don't think anyone's ready for change, but are you willing to try? And even simple things like, you know, leaders talk last, active listening, even being vulnerable and asking for help from those around you. I think that's a huge first step in change. It's only behaviors that will change a culture and people need to see the change from that senior directive in order to really believe that this is going to be an enterprise. transformation and that will really enable agility within our enterprise system. So Lee doesn't need to be the role model. What is it that Gandhi that said be the world you want to see or something like that? Yeah, perfect. Aisling, thank you very much for coming on. It's been so nice to meet you in person. Hopefully our paths will cross again at some point in the near future. I'm going to put your LinkedIn link into the show notes. I'm saying this for everyone. Hopefully people are getting the gist of it now. Try and make it easy for people to find you. If people do have questions about anything you've spoken about, are you happy to receive their questions? I'd welcome all connections and questions. As I say, I'm something I'm really passionate about and I'm willing to help and support anyone in these conversations. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on, everyone. Thank you for listening. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to listen to this talk in 10. If you've enjoyed it, please get onto social media and let everyone know the bits you like the most. and we'll call it a day there. Thank you everyone once again.
