Our experience at Agile Amsterdam 2018
Last October, Antonia and I (both Scrum Masters at Takeaway.com) decided to participate in Agile Amsterdam. The topic of the conference was Agility at Scale and the goal was to understand how other companies are scaling and how they are bringing agile ideas to more areas.
In the end, we both agreed that even though we can’t say that we learned something about scaling, it was helpful to see how other companies are working and to find some inspiration. We decided to highlight the most important takeaways from our perspectives.
Which talks did you enjoy the most?
Antonia: Most of the talks were good but there were two talks that were especially interesting. The funny thing about both talks was that at the beginning, I really thought they would be so boring and that I would be wasting my time. But the opposite happened. The first talk was by Eelco Rustenburg and the second by Richard Sheridan, the CEO at Menlo Innovations. I’ll explain the first and let Gilberto take the second.
The main point of Eelco’s presentation and the most impactful part was when he showed some statistics from a Chaos Report by Standish in which 50,000 projects were evaluated, first in 2002 and again later in 2013. They discovered that many things have improved since then, but what is not changing is the number of features a team builds that are not used. Apparently, we are now able to build products faster, but we still are building features that nobody uses. He recommends starting thinking and evaluating our features before even bringing them to the team. This is something so obvious, but that we often forget.
Gilberto: For me, these were also the best talks of the conference. The second one, by Richard Sheridan, was even better. He talked about how he is working at Menlo Innovations, his philosophy, and values. In particular, I like that he makes decisions with the mentality of “let’s try it”. This has allowed him to do things that other companies are not willing to do such as allowing employees to bring their pets, even their kids, to the office, and letting the team reorganize themselves, among other things. Of course, not everything is possible. What works depends on the context, but having the mentality of trying things first is a good idea.
Was there anything else you enjoyed?
Antonia: We decided to go to Jeff Gothelf’s “Lean, Agile & Design Thinking” master class. There I learned something really nice and interesting that I think will help me with my daily work: “Test High — Risk Hypothesis”.
The process consists of changing the way we work by framing our tasks as a business problem to solve (rather than a solution to implement). Once you do this, you can dissect that business problem into the core assumptions. Next, those assumptions are transformed into the hypothesis that will be validated by designing experiments. A hypothesis looks like this:
We believe this [outcome] will be achieved if [these users] successfully [attain this user benefit] with [this solution/feature].
And how do we know that our hypothesis was successful? If the outcome is a measurable change in customer behavior.
In other words: I have learned that when we need to implement something new or if we need to improve something that already exists, it’s a good idea to analyze it beforehand, starting with a hypothesis statement. It’s easy to check if there is any need for the proposed change and what exactly to expect as an outcome. Still, the most important is to experiment. Stop thinking too much and try different things. It doesn’t matter if we will succeed or not. In the end, you will always learn something new.
Gilberto: Besides the master class, I was impressed by the people at the conference. Most were not coaches but project and product managers, leaders in their field and people interested in making things different in their own office. It was nice to spend time with them.
Conclusion
Going to a conference is usually the best place to meet people who are also motivated to improve things. It is a good place for connections and learning about other companies. This conference was not the exception. It was a unique opportunity to exchange opinions and ideas and to be inspired. Finally, it was a nice way to reflect on our own work. After our conversations, we felt really proud about our team, we realized that we are already doing many of the things that people are trying to start at other companies. In our humble opinion, we are doing a pretty good job.
Any thoughts, suggestions or feedback? Feel free to comment here or find me on twitter. Also, make sure to check out our careers page to discover Tech jobs at Takeaway.com!
