It's 2016, and we're all supposed to be using Agile and Lean Startup methods, right? But how do we mix them together? For many product and engineering teams, balancing the technical excellence of Agile with the experiment focus of Lean Startup has proven quite challenging. This session will provide the basic principles, a high-level process, and several real world examples (from both enterprise and startups) of product teams successfully balancing these two great philosophies. Replay webinar: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/lean-on-agile-getting

1. Lean On Agile
Getting the Best of Both Worlds

2. About Me
● 17 years in Silicon Valley.
● Tech background: Titles like VP
of Engineering and CTO
● Early adopter of both Agile,
Kanban, and Lean Startup.
● Worked on 6 startups.
● Coached dozens of enterprise
product and tech teams.
● Wrote a book on startups:
startuppatterns.com.

3. About Blackwillow Studios
The next chapter in my ongoing adventure in
tech product innovation…
● Leveraging methods we developed at Neo.
● Picking up where consulting left off.
● Teaching large organizations how to
develop products like a startup.

4. Why Agile or Lean?

5. Why Agile?
Going digital means you are now a software company.
Software companies employ Agile. Why?
● Flexibility: Requirements don’t need to be planned in advance.
● Cost: Agile encourages modular design. Changes to the software are cheaper.
● Recruitment: Engineers are attracted to good software development practices.

6. Why Lean Startup?
Because Lean Startup allows you to learn from customers… FAST!!
● Learning: Lean Startup generates knowledge about the market quickly and cheaply (relatively).
● Validation: Helps make sure you’re building the right thing.
● Alignment: Aligns your Agile product development to overall business goals.

7. How fast is fast, exactly?
A quarterly product update generates new knowledge about the customer 90x slower than a daily update.
And most startups actually ship new versions multiple times per day!
So, a typical startup can iterate on a product with real customers 100 times between two quarterly releases
of an enterprise competitor’s product in the same market.

8. Quick aside...
“Lean” is not “Lean Startup”
Lean product development is
concerned with optimizing the
overall value chain. Think:
continuous improvement, workflows,
Kanban, etc.
Lean Startup is the use of
experiments to reduce risk about
the market for a proposed product
or service.

9. The Team

10. Importance of Team Structure
● Cross-functional
● Dedicated
● Colocated
You must have at least two out of three!

11. Team Structure
Why Cross-functional?
Cross-functional teams create better
products than teams organized into
functional silos.
The feedback loops are tighter, and
so there is less rework and less
miscommunication.

12. Team Structure
Why Dedicated?
Tacit knowledge develops over
time, and can't really be measured
or taught.
A team that grows its tacit
knowledge can do more in less time
and avoid more mistakes.

13. Team Structure
Why Co-located?
Co-located teams develop better
bonds of trust with their teammates.
There are faster feedback loops,
more quick, informal decision
making, and fewer meetings.

14. Team size affects the volume of communication.
A team of size n means that there are n(n-1)/2 possible communication paths
between one team member and any other team member.
● A team of 3 people = 3 communication paths.
● A team of 4 people = 6 communication paths.
● A team of 5 people = 10 communication paths.
● A team of 8 people = 28 communication paths.
● A team of 15 people = 105 communication paths.
Optimal team size is between 5 and 8 people. And 8 people is still pushing it!

15. The Culture

16. Importance of Team Culture
● Everyone on the team is values-aligned.
● The vision and strategy are crystal clear.
● Safe-to-fail experimentation is encouraged.

17. Importance of Team Culture
● Establish team working agreements at the beginning.
● Have retrospectives frequently.
● Encourage direct, and honest communication.
Also, co-location makes culture development easier.

18. The Process

19. Customer
Development
Validate your assumptions
State hypotheses before designing
experiments.
Everyone on the team talks to
customers.
One at a time. No focus groups.

20. Kanban
Make all work visible
Use a visual system for all work.
Do only one thing at a time.
Measure cycle time, not utilization.

21. Cadence
Daily, Weekly, Monthly
Daily stand-ups.
Weekly planning.
Monthly retrospectives.

22. Track Progress
User Stories or Experiments?
Experiments on a weekly cadence.
User stories to build the
experiment’s features.
Measure both speed and learning.

23. The Tools

24. Give them Macs
Startups use open source, cloud,
and modern frameworks.
Slack and other tools speed
communication.
Cloud services are fast and easy to
build and tear down.
Dev-Ops enables rapid, continuous
deployment.
Metrics dashboards keep the team
on track.

25. In the wild...

26. Approaches to Lean + Agile
● Nesting Lean Startup tactics inside your Agile sprints.
○ User stories drive interviews or other experiments. Can be muddy, confusing.
● Nesting Agile inside your Lean Startup loop.
○ Better, but tends to embed “prototype” code in production by accident or urgency (tech debt).
● The “dual track” or “bi-modal” approach.
○ Entirely separate team for innovation versus team for scaling proven ideas.
○ Slow, lots of information lost between teams, plus tendency to over-engineer solution.

27. Talk to us. We can help

28. Blackwillow Studios
Popup Incubators
Corporate Innovation Centers & Ecosystems
Innovation Assessments
Blackwillow Labs & Training

29. Use incubators to rapidly test ideas.
“Graduated” ideas that pass the incubator are
spun out or spun in as new businesses.
Scale these businesses in the same way that you
would scale any startup.
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Don’t hand newly formed teams and ideas back
to operational teams! Keep them apart.
Our Approach