« May 2016 | Main | July 2016 »
You can have the best Agile development team in the world, but if they are given the wrong thing to build, it really won't matter. That's why you should use Lean Startup concepts to validate learning.
I've also taught Agile Marketing so the idea came to me to bracket software development with Lean Startup and Agile Marketing. This can be a crazy-powerful lever that a CEO would love to have at her fingertips.
This Openview article discusses using Scrum for business projects.
When I introduce Scrum to business teams, I focus on two key questions.
1. What product will the team produce by the end of the sprint?
In marketing, the finished product could be a white paper or a campaign. We want to create some form of finished product by the end of sprint and knowing what the finished product is helps our planning. For a white paper, we may break it down into an outline and key sections. Knowing the product we're building leads to the second question.
2. What people need to be on the cross-functional team to build the product?
We don't want to waste time convincing people in a silo that they need to work on our project. We want them to be part of the team from the start. So we identify all team members needed to complete the product by sprint's end.
You may also want T-shaped people on your team because they have the ability to work on multiple tasks, and that means the team will complete more features during a sprint.