Team Communication

Tally sheets might help your team

There is a simple tool to let your team reflect on their communication. It might help you, if there is somebody on your team who talks very much and some people who remain mostly silent. The tool is: a sheet of paper and a pencil. Just participate on a teams meeting, search a quiet corner and make a tally sheet of who in the team spoke how often. After the meeting is over, offer the team to share your observations and let the team decide, what to make of this observation. Maybe a very healthy discussion will follow...

If there is no discussion coming up, there is eventually no problem with this fact or the team is not ready to tackle this at the moment. You might try it some time later again.

The Agile Coach Journey

Over the course of an agile project, the role of an agile coach changes massively. I tried to draw a little comic on the agile coaches change on the path to agile.

Honestly - I somehow do not like this drawing as much as I liked the "What is Agile" drawing. After all - I am obviously still in heavy practicing mode ;-)

Great Teams!

Last week, I attended the ALE 2013 unconference. This is definitely one of the most awesome conferences I have ever seen. There is lots of energy, ideas and passion around there and it is an extremely inspiring environment.

I used the opportunity of open space to facilitate a session on "Great Teams" there. I will share the result of this session here. The format of the session was very simple. Every attendee got the opportunity to tell the story of a great team he was part of or has seen. After the story was told, I asked something like "If you should pick out one thing, that made this team a great team, what would it be?". Many attendees told great stories and we finally came up with the following list of things, that make teams "great".

Do you have stories to tell? What is the one thing, that makes your team great? Feel free to use the comments section!

I Have a Dream

I have a dream that one day, in our industry where business people are seen as mercenary beasts and product developers as assembly line workers, those business people and product developers will go hand in hand and together deliver the greatest possible value for customers, they can.

I have a dream today!

;-)

Do you have a dream, too?

Lessons from our Lean Startup Experiment

So - last week, two friends and I conducted this four day long lean startup experiment. Which lessons did I take away? The first and foremost lesson is: It's great fun, to work focused and hands on in such a small team on a nice product!

Further lessons were:

• You should formulate your hypotheses clear and write them down on a piece of paper. Do really ask yourself which assertions you want to verify - and if the experiment you are conducting will indeed give you evidence for that.
• Even if you did this, you will be inclined to neglect negative evidence - especially if you are in love with your own product. Your head will always tell you that everything was wrong (data, experiment, people) - but not your idea. This is a real challenge! And it makes the first point even more important.
• An MVP is not necessarily very small. There are some hypotheses, you will have to invest a good amount of work into, to proof or disprove them.
• You should have enough time and reserves to do some pivots. Otherwise your are relatively certain to fail with your first or second wrong hypothesis.

I asked myself after the experiment if we did pivot at all. Since we did not write up our hypothesis formally (we only talked about them), I did not know immediately. But thinking about it, I found that we pivoted quite some times in that four days. On the first day we switched from the idea of building a mobile app to building a website first. There were further pivots - and I think all of them helped us to get a much better understanding of what we should build.

Conclusion: Taking a lean startup approach really forces you to get in touch with real people - potential users. Those people are able to give you extremely valuable feedback in very early stages of product development. It's a great approach for product development - but there is still much more to be learned and done to build great products!

Lean Startup Experiment - Day 4 (and last)

At this moment we decided to finish our lean startup experiment. We were currently coping with technological difficulties with a relatively simple feature. It is now clear, that we will not be able to accomplish everything we wanted to until Friday evening. Thus, we all agreed to stop and use the last day somehow else.

Why did we struggle? A short retrospective revealed the following issues:

• We did by far not do enough marketing - thus we had almost no real customer feedback on our site (there was exactly one person subscribing the service :-(). We did get some feedback indicating, that potential customers did not really get the idea of our page.
• We did not prepare well enough for our experiment. We used a whole lot of technologies, we did not really know. This broke our neck today.
• One week is really short for delivering even a relatively simple project in a serious manner.
• Summertime is a really hard time to stay focused on such a project ;-)

But after all, we all still learned a great deal. Not only technology, but also how to work in short cycles as a small team. Setting small reachable targets every day and having short status syncs worked extremely well for us.

A big thank you to all readers of this blog and all supporters giving us valuable feedback on our little product! We will now go on and enjoy a great free three days before going back to business as usual :-)

Lean Startup Experiment - Day 3

Day 3 of our experiment is over. It was a day full of work and (from our point of view) huge progress on the project. We improved the layout massively and included some hints on the page about our intentions. We got the large image view working and took care of some legal aspects. You are now able to register yourself as a prospect customer by clicking on the login button and sending an email. We solved several infrastructural problems including deploying our app to the Amazon cloud (EC2).
If you would have asked us this morning, if we would be able to accomplish this - nobody of us would have said "yes" probably :-) It was a great day and we learned a great deal of things about all the new frameworks and technology we never used before!

Sven working hard to keep the backlog up-to-date. We are working to fast :-)

We are very proud of our layout. Especially because there are no designers in our team. If you like our design, too - or hate it: Please tell us! We need feedback! Fastly! (You may use the comments section, for example)

The current UI prototype contains some description on what we want to achieve. We love it :-)

Key learnings of Day 3

• Working with lower outside temperatures is MUUUCH better!!!
• JavaScript is shit
• JavaScript is cool
• We did not get any customer feedback today - which we regret. We will have to improve on that massively tomorrow!
• On the other side - we got a lot of things done, which was really great fun!
• IT guys cannot live without becoming sarcastic - even if successful ;-)
• We think the purpose of our project is not clear enough for visitors on the first view. We will have to improve massively on that!
• We are not able to acquire enough prospect customers by doing marketing over Facebook, Google+ and Twitter only. We will have to try out other marketing mechanisms.

Our main goal in the next two days is to come so far as to be able to go outside and sell our idea to passers-by. Functionality of the site should be so far, that those people will immediately see a value for themselves in using our project. Ambitious goal! Let's see...