1.
How to build
High Performing Digital Product Teams for
Your New Innovative Business?
Integrating Agile Methodologies, Lean Startup and Design Thinking
Ravneet Kaur
CEO & President
Agile School Inc.

2.
About Agile School
Leading you on the path of Agility
• Global consultancy surrounding everything to do with Agile.
Our services offerings surround Agile
• Coaching
• Agile / Scrum, Kanban, Design Thinking Coaching
• Training
• International Software Quality Institute (iSQI) Certified Trainings – Agile Essentials, Agile Business Analysts and Agile Tester
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Certified Trainings
• Lean Kanban University (LKU) Certified Trainings
• DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA) Certified Trainings
• Project Management Institute – Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
• ICAgile Certified Trainings
• Design Thinking University Certified courses
• Consulting
• Focused towards your Agile Adoption and Organizational Transformation.
• Assessment
• Agile Leadership, Business Agility, Team Health, Scaled Agile Framework Health, DevOps Health etc.

3.
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About Agile School

4.
The Challenge

5.
“Our Tech Teams are learning Agile.
Our Product Teams are learning Lean and our
Design Teams are learning Design Thinking.
Which one is right?“
The Dilemma

6.
Agile
“We value responding to change over
following a plan.“

7.
Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

8.
Scrum

9.
Kanban

10.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

11.
Agile gets business results
30–75% faster
time to market
Happier, more
motivated
employees
20–50% increase in
productivity
50%+ defect
reduction

12.
“Agile“ was born to deal with “Uncertainity“
Agile is being “hired“ today to drive velocity (speed).
Agile is about efficient delivery of high quality code.
Agile promises greater predictibility, throughput and productivity.
The Customer Feedback is being limited to Stakeholders and not the end users.

13.
Agile is about faster time to market and
increased throughput
Is Agile, really solving our problems?
Or
Is it, just helping us to push more
through the system faster?
Amazon pushes new code live to their customers every 11.6 seconds

14.
DevOps enables greater agility in
Software Development
Software is no more a static piece of code but a continuous and
dynamic system that is regularly optimized, augmented and improved.

15.
70%-80% of new product
development that fails, does not lack
of advanced technology but because of
failure to understand user’s needs”
– Prof. Eric von Hippel, MIT Business School 2007
Agile Methodologies are using
proxy Users and proxy Customers

16.
It is possible to finish on schedule and under budget
but still deliver nothing of value!!

17.
Lean Startup
The question every project seeks to
answer is not, “Can we build It?“ It‘s
“Should We Build It?“

18.
Lean Startup

19.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

20.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
MVP was designed as a tool of Lean Startup to help
teams answer two questions:
1. What‘s the most important thing we need to
learn first on our Project?
2. What‘s the least amount of work we need to do
to learn that?

21.
1. With the push for velocity on teams, MVP is now largely a stand-
in for Phase I.
2. Experimentation is not something for which teams are rewarded.
3. While many teams are shipping less software, at least initially,
they are not leveraging that initial release to learn and optimize.
MVPs – as adopted by the industry today

22.
MVPs are restricted to
“Innovation Labs“
Lean Startup is for Product
Managers.
Do all the experiments
“upfront“.

23.
Design Thinking
“Are We solving a Real Problem, for a
Real Customer, in a meaningful way?“

24.
Delivering on time and within
budget is of no use if we build
the wrong thing, at the wrong
time, for the wrong people.

25.
Build the right thing, at
right time for right people.

26.
Get out of your office and go find out
what are customers’ aspirations
28

27.
Never ask your users what
they want,
never ask the developers what
they think the users want
29

28.
30

29.
Design Thinking Process
Space
Exploration
Find
Patterns
Define
Design
Principles
Make
Tangibles
Iterate
Relentlessly

30.
Space Exploration (learn from people)

31.
Find Patterns

32.
Define Design Principles

33.
Make Tangibles
35

34.
Iterate Relentlessly
36

35.
Some facts about Design Thinking
Still!! Customer Empathy is
hard to find in large
Companies !!!

36.
“Our Tech Teams are learning Agile.
Our Product Teams are learning Lean and our
Design Teams are learning Design Thinking.
Which one is right?“
The Dilemma

37.
Organisations live in Silos and do Local Optimization

38.
Integrating Lean, Agile
and Design Thinking
Pick and choose the specific elements from each
practice that work well for your teams and the
Brand values you‘re trying to convey.

39.
Work in short cycles
• Innovative Product creation is complex and unpredictable and so are
people.
• Whether it‘s about creating an innovative product or a process change
or transformation, work is short cycles.

40.
Hold regular Retrospectives

41.
Put Customer at the center of everything
Ask following questions on regular
basis:
1. How do we know we‘re shipping
something users care about?
2. How do we find out?
3. How does that affect what we
prioritize?

42.
Go and See

43.
Balance product discovery with delivery
work by only testing high-risk hypotheses

44.
Do less research, more often

45.
Work (and train) as one balanced team

46.
Radical Transparency

47.
Review your incentive structure (and
performance management criteria)

48.
Make product discovery work a first class
citizen of your backlog

49.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, your Customers don‘t care
whether you practice Lean, Agile or Design Thinking.
They care about great products and services that solve
meaningful problems for them in effective ways.