The Lean Event — day 2

I attended the Lean Event on 27th & 28th April. Here are my notes from day 2. Unfortunately I missed the last talk on the day as I had to rush off to the airport but it was about ‘Ethical decision making’ and sounded amazing.

Josh Seiden, the strategy myth

“Strategy is not planning — it’s making an integrated set of decisions”

· Lean metrics are seen as operational, incremental in nature — not good for the big stuff

· Consider the whole

· Incremental agile — not considering the whole, lots of small pieces, deliver the vision but never go back and see if the vision changed

· Iterative agile — do a thing and then do it again, and again and again to make it better

· Iterative agile = continuous

· Iterative works at any level of abstraction

· There is no reason why we can’t iterate at any level

· Lean methods can work at any level

· Strategy is not planning — it’s making an integrated set of decisions

· If you think of strategy as a plan you get into the world of big design up front

· 70% of companies fail to get what they want out of their strategic plan

· The local knowledge problem — People at the center of the organization are making the decisions but they don’t understand what’s really needed. The center doesn’t have enough information

· Emergence — Building complex systems, it’s difficult to predict how they will work and how they will be used. Very hard to plan against

· Continuous strategy:

• Management create strategic pillars for the year highlighting where they want to focus energy
• Map the list of projects from bottom, to strategic pillars at the top — then throw away about half of them

• Don’t use a roadmap — use outcomes
• Commit at middle management layer to the outcomes
• Reserve the right to change the projects they are doing if they are not working

· Where strategy meets lean: the “Mission Command” method — principles

• Freedom to act within set boundaries/constraints
• Back briefing — confirmation of the order, the team feeding back local knowledge. Richer communication
• Outcomes over output
• Oriented towards learning in the face of uncertainty

· Strategy is a set of integrated choices

· Each piece of your business needs to fit together in a sensible way

· Doing strategy means designing systems

· One approach — what does it mean to sketch strategy?

• How do we sketch outcomes as a business?
• Ecosystem diagram: annotate diagram with value creation points, then identify hypothesis to suggest how to measure this

• Cross functional exercise
• Use skepticism as the basis for a hypothesis for what we need to think about
• Lean is a strategic tool — continuous process
• Strategy is a system
• System is designed
• Strategy is not a plan. Strategy is a system that is designed.
• Shift those feature conversations to a conversation about outcomes

Chris Matts, Metrics are the devils dandruff

“Just focusing on KPIs in your organisation will reduce creativity. People will focus on things that are certain wins, as they do not feel safe to fail.”

· Lead time is a hypothesis, not a metric

· Customers into a funnel is also not a business metric

· Chief Product Owner should only be talking about the metrics with Product Owners, not features. The chief POs job is coherence, not to tell POs how to do their job

· Metrics allow us to create alignment and have conversations

· Initiative mapping — agree what success looks like and how it will be measured

· Encourage our managers to talk about what’s important — the outcomes, not micromanaging

· Need to make sure that people don’t just keep on doing what worked before or somewhere else, applying it to every situation

· KPIs: A metric is purely the measure. A KPI is when you say ‘I want you to increase the measure by X%’

· Just focusing on KPIs in your organization will reduce creativity. People will focus on things that are certain wins as they do not feel safe to fail

Jiri Jerabek, Lean experience mapping

“People cherry-pick things from research findings to re-enforce their belief”

· Without access to real users it doesn’t matter what tools or process you use. You will fail.

· Contextual Map — used to record the context of what people were doing with the prototype, where they were using it, how they are using it. Shows how people are using a thing over time

· Experience map — key user journey through prototype, illustrated physically

· User journey nod with 5 levels of experience below it on postits

· Made UX process more transparent — people who don’t know about UX start asking questions about it

· Whole team involved in identifying/adding comments to experience map

· Can clearly see points in journey that need to be improved

· Iterate again, test again, plot map again

· Helps get everyone on team hands on with the data — the team starts analyzing as you research. Feeds directly into backlog

· If in growth mode — helps you design over time

· Valuable if new or exploratory project

· Living tool — not a deliverable

Melissa Perri, designing to learn

“MVP is the minimum amount of effort required to learn. It doesn’t have to be software, it doesn’t have to be released, it doesn’t have to be a product at all.”

· MVP has become a dirty word

· A lot of people mistake MVP for lets just throw some stuff up there and see if it works

· MVP is the minimum amount of effort required to learn. It doesn’t have to be software, it doesn’t have to be released, it doesn’t have to be a product at all

· The term MVP has evolved since 2009

· Lets get rid of the term MVP and focus on the goal of figuring out what your customers want and need

· MVP is a process not a product

· Starting with a minimum feature set is dangerous because we don’t ask the important questions

· Problem solution fit — does this problem really exist? Are we capable enough to solve it?

· Problem market fit — is my product desirable enough to this market?

· Starts with a goal

· AARRR metrics

· When do we focus on big ideas?

· Experimentation is a way to prove big ideas, not ignore them

· Product strategy emerges from experimentation

· Product leaders need to stop dictating the feature set to their teams and give them room to experiment

· Product Kata

1. Company goal

2. What is the current state

3. Set smaller target goal so people think it’s achievable

4. Team experiments to reach goal

· Bakes learning into the team as a habit

· We have to make it known that it’s ok to fail

· Leaders need to give teams room to test and fail

· Waiting to ship things/ waiting for it to be perfect costs money

· Make a commitment to go back and iterate

· Start focusing on finding a product strategy based on what customers actually want

Cindy Alvarez, your brain is out to get you

“If we aren’t careful, we ask questions that validate our world. Our customers give us answers that validate theirs.”

· Cognitive bias

· If we aren’t careful, we ask questions that validate our world. Our customers give us answers that validate theirs.

· We ask questions that are likely to prove us right

· Cognitive dissonance — our brains don’t like to hold two conflicting ideas at once

· Confirmation bias — our brains like to prove us right, so ignores/listens to information accordingly. It affects the things that we ask and the things that we hear

· Anchoring — our brains (irrationally) fixate on first piece of information and it affects later opinions

· Ask more open ended questions

· We answer questions based on the person we want to be, not based on the honest us

· People give answers that they think are socially acceptable. So we need to learn to ask questions that they feel confortable answering

· Hyperbolic discounting — a persons desire for an immediate reward over a higher value, delayed reward

· Know your bias — examine them and write them down

· People don’t often identify their biggest risk

· Ask what would most disappoint you if you put out an MVP and talked to customers and they said they thought it was crap?

· Create checks and balances in your organization, be objective, have an equal and opposite check and balance

· Listen to people, make it ok to talk about what they dread

· Make connections — talk to people

· Give credit for the right things

· Share what you do know early and often

· The difference between 6 years olds and the people you work with is that 6 year olds are honest about what they want

Sophie Freiermuth, teaching lean startup to kids & managers

“Apply digital where it is needed, don’t just throw technology at things”

· UX needs a product

· Products need a business

· Apply digital where it is needed, don’t just throw technology at things

Dana Chisnell, crossing the culture chasm

“Exposure to users through direct observation of work gives context for all the work you are designing and coding”

· Delivering service to the public mediated by technology

· Exposure to users through direct observation of work gives context for all the work you are designing and coding

· Redefine risk through small experiments

· Collaboration across old boundaries