3 lessons learnt at Agile 2018

Roi Fine
Roi Fine
Sep 1, 2018 · 4 min read

Agile has much to give to all teams as many companies are discovering.

As a product manager who builds software for agile teams, I was curious to find what’s the latest and greatest from the recent Agile 2018 conference in San Diego.

Surprisingly, all of the main talks were about communication challenges companies, teams and individuals face. There were some funny fruit analogies as well! Read below top 3 lessons I learned:

Lesson #1 — Teams will do better focusing on customer impact rather then hitting deadlines

Troy Magennis, an agile coach, with his talk “What’s the story about Agile Data” finds that teams spend most of their “data effort” in project status reports rather than prioritizing their projects or measuring the respective customer impact.

“Status updates are like watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside”

The risk is hidden inside

Troy talked about how obsessed he was about status updates back in the day he was a manager. That status obsession got him in trouble but also gave him important learnings:

  • All updates were green — despite shit hitting the fan, teams were afraid to disappoint him regarding due dates, so they lied
  • Team’s creativity was down — While teams delivered on time more often, their ability to react to feedback during and post project completion was hurt.

My takeaways:

  • Having regular status updates can have a toll on teams’ ability to react on feedback, especially during the project. Although this process reduce uncertainty for business managers, it puts a lot of pressure on teams to deliver without delays.
  • How can we help teams shift focus to better prioritization measuring impact instead of status meetings

Lesson #2 — Instead of transforming into agile, companies should revisit their foundations

The second talk I watched was Dominic Price . I feel Dom presented a different, no bullshit angle, he talked about the small (but big) things that can make the difference between growing companies and large companies.

Companies suffer from dysfunction — Dysfunction is the gap between what you know and what you apply. For example, I go and read lots of books about how to handle crucial conversations but continue to avoid them. Same can be said about companies who invest lots of money in agile transformation but fail to implement learning in their day day.

Dysfunction symptoms companies have:

  • Trust issues- 78% of people don’t trust their team mates (wow). 59% say the reason is poor communication
  • Priority silos — People and teams don’t know about each other’s priorities
  • Planning too much — Teams are required to provide detailed roadmaps 12 months ahead

And the recommended medicine:

  • Health monitors — Empower teams to identify what is critical for them to improve
  • Project posters — Drive alignment and accountability by answering important questions like “why are we doing this?” “what problem are we solving?”
  • Share learnings — Every month share 1 thing you learned with your team

Key takeaways:

  • Companies who want to be more ”agile” need to re-visit their foundations rather than “transform”
  • I was amazed to see the stats about lack of trust between teammates. What do you think your team’s stats are?

Lesson #3 — Teams should create an environment that makes it uncomfortable not to give feedback

Kim Scott, ex-Googler, gave a great talk about communication and relationships, building into the “open” agile theme. In short, each one of us should strive to get, give and encourage feedback between teammates. Giving feedback is an art, great team leaders need to create an environment that not only supports feedback but actually makes it uncomfortable not to share one.

Giving feedback — It’s an art!

  • You’d like to show care and challenge
  • Praising in public vs. criticizing in private
  • Important to give it immediately

Solicit feedback — It’s hard to get it!

  • Ask for specific questions, i.e: tell me what I should do or stop doing right now for us to work better together.
  • Rule of 6, i.e: when asking for feedback, don’t speak for 6 seconds. The other person will surely feel uncomfortable and start talking

Key takeaway:

  • To create an environment that makes giving “radical candor” feedback a norm, it’s important for teams to be more open. I’d love to see more people share stories about how feedback “opened their eyes” and brought behavioral change.

Thanks for reading, please leave your thoughts at the comment section. All the talks are available here https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/videos

Roi Fine

Written by

Roi Fine

Product manager @ Atlassian. Enthusiastic about agile and enterprise software. Find more of my posts at www.roifine.com

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade