- Three core agile principles: work small + talk to each other + make people’s lives better
- You only plan enough details to be able to start (not finish)
- Implement that (work small), get feedback from real users (talk to each other)
- You work small so you can get feedback sooner
- Start with the critical parts that add the most value first so you can get to MVP faster
- Completing tasks doesn’t make people’s lives better; it’s the wrong “goal”
- The real strategic goal is focused on the user’s experience
- Improving the user’s lives improves your team’s as well
- Do that, and work will be fun and make you happy
- If it doesn’t, something is wrong about how the team is working
- Psychological safety is a prerequisite
- It’s about everybody being able to speak without fear
- Increasing the amount of lively, excited discussion you can have
- Respect:
- Give people the benefit of the doubt
- Management should let the people doing the work make the decisions
- A team can talk to a customer and make a decision to change something and just change it without having to wait for permission
- Any lack of respect that involves waiting for permission slows down user feedback cycles, which is the key to everything
- Trust:
- Trust the people doing the work to make decent decisions
- If you have to ask permission to do something necessary, you are not trusted
- If you need training, just do it
- Control hierarchies don’t work with agile
- Agile is faster because you don’t waste time building things nobody wants or needs
- Building in large chunks without frequent feedback increases the risk that you are doing just that
- The most valuable thing a 10X programmer can do is teach everyone else to be as good as they are so the whole system improves and they don’t become a bottleneck everyone sends work to
- There’s no value in the process itself; there’s only value in getting better at delivering value to customers
- If the focus is on doing scrum (or any process) better instead of on the people doing the work and the people the work is for, the workflow will fail
- The people doing the work and using the outcome of the work are more important than any process
- If any part of the process isn’t helping the people, drop it
- If it would take 5 minutes to fix a problem for a user, just fix it; forget the ticket
- Collaboration
- Negotiating is not collaboration
- Instead of arguing, run an experiment and see how it goes
- Any focus on individuals is a mistake; the team as a whole is what matters
- Learning is the work
- Releasing small and collaborating with users to figure what’s right and wrong is learning
- The point of releasing a story as an experiment is to learn; you can’t fail if your goal is to learn something
- Welcoming change is essentials
- If something needs to change, you just change it
- Beware of tactical roadmaps like a complete quarterly plan
- Prefer strategic goals focused on outcomes for the business and users
- Then, let the team figure out how to move in those directions
- Changing accomodates learning, so don’t plan too rigidly
- To be effective, you have to be developing your own ways of working based on a set of core principles
Original video by DevTernity Conference: