Steve Neiderhauser

Minimum Viable Products

I've worked with several product managers who never really grasped the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP). They often over engineered user interfaces or added features the customer never wanted or used.

It usually took one failed product before they caught on and started asking me how this MVP thing works.

It's all about creating learning loops with your customers.

Chris Bank pens this brilliant article -- Building Minimum Viable Products at Spotify.

So good, everyone on an Agile team should read it twice. We learn about Spotify's 4-stage iterative product cycle.

Think It

Build It

Ship It

Tweak It

The four stages combine practices from Lean Startup and Agile. Keep reading the article and you'll learn the Cupcake Model of product development.

Pixar Lessons in Creativity

Can creativity be learned? Pixar thinks so.

Check out these lessons in creativity.

Key take aways:

Creativity is a learned skill. Innovation happens when we learn to see things differently.

Innovation is a process that is developed over time. We have to embrace that, and give it time.

You must look deeper and demand more to truly uncover creativity.

Experiment Map

You've heard of Lean Startup. How do you get started with experiments?

Simple, use the Lean Entrepreneur Experiment Map. The key is to start practicing with the map because practice will develop your skills and change your behavior.

Role of Leaders in Continuous Innovation?

Just finished watching Brant Cooper's webinar -- What's the Role of Leaders in Continuous Innovation?

He captures a number of quotes on his Twitter feed.

Here's some that I wrote down... You know, for inspiration.

How to overcome opposition to lean. Treat your company as the customer and run experiments to get results.

How to succeed in a large enterprise. Push back and break the rules.

We have to understand your customers deeply and move quickly for continuous innovation.

Update: The webinar is now on Youtube.

What is Technical Debt

Nice definition of technical debt from Wikispeed.

Lean Experiments

Here's a list of Lean Experiment Techniques.

Check out the example for the Fake-O Backend.

Stuff Bad ScrumMasters Say

Adam Weisbart creates this video short -- World's worst ScrumMaster.

This is an example of artistically treating what could be a mundane topic and making it entertaining.

Peter Drucker Forum

Peter Drucker Forum happens this week, Nov 13 - 14. Here's the Forum's Twitter feed.

Some great Leadership thinking springs from the Drucker Forum.

How to Deliver Working Software

Infoq interviews Jeff Sutherland. Even though Silicon Valley companies have adopted Scrum, what’s the biggest problem? Eighty percent of teams do not have tested, working software at the end of the sprint. This is a gross violation of the Agile Manifesto’s second value:

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Here are three techniques I practice to deliver working software at the end of a sprint.

Limit Work in Progress — Limit the number of user stories in progress. For example, the team only works on three stories at a time. This constraint compels the team to complete a story before starting another. I also teach teams to swarm on the top priority story and focus on completing it. Stop starting, and start finishing.

Hire full-stack developers — For your team to effectively swarm on a story, people need to have multiple skills. Developers should know how to write code in all layers: UI, business and database layers.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) — In many cases, stories are not finished because the team is still testing. Solution? Test first. When a developer practices TDD, she writes the unit test first, then the code to pass the test. The unit tests can be run every time a new build runs, making the code self-testing.

Practice the three techniques and let me know how they worked. What challenges did you discover?

Continuous Transformation

Scrum Inc posts an article on Continuous Transformation. So many people are afraid of failure. This article explains why fear of failure is a failure.

Acceptance of failure and, more importantly, the notion that failure is an important aspect of learning, is a key characteristic of well-run organizations.