The Keys that Align

Impacts of a rapid release cadence

Every software team is working to establish a predictable, valuable, and rapid release cadence. As an agile development shop ramps up, it can be amazing just how many people within the organization need to stay aligned around that rapid cadence. 

It is critical to have clear, usable, shareable language to describe the work that is being done in order to keep everyone aligned. Product Management has to understand the deliverable the team is working on Now. The engineering team needs a scope that is clear enough to limit scope creep. Marketing needs to understand the Wow’s that they can market for the release the team is working on now, what they think they will be working on next, and big dreams that they might work on some day. 

These are the Design Thinking Keys that Align, and some lessons learned from good retrospectives

Hills

Hills statements are used to describe the meaningful outcomes that a system provides. It is critical that the engineers building the product, the marketing team who is describing the features and benefits of the product, and product management, to agree on the work that is being done. The engineering team should be able to ask themselves if the work they are doing is directly advancing toward recognizing the desired meaningful outcomes to make sure they are not chasing rabbits. The marketing team should be able to speak in common, usable, sharable language about the product. Everyone needs a roadmap process that allows them to focus on one thing at a time, and make agile adjustments when the market, user activity, or other forces shift. Design Thinking uses Hills statements to help with these challenges.

A well written Hills statement will satisfy all of the stakeholders when it identifies three critical components, The Who, What and Wow of the hill. The Who will identify the user that is the recipient of the meaningful outcome, the What is the action they take in the system to initiate that outcome, and the Wow is the meaningful outcome. If the Wow feels like a meh, then it might be a good time to employ the 5-Whys technique to find the real meaningful outcome in a way that leaves room for innovation.

Playbacks

If Hills statements help us get aligned around what we are working on now, then we need a way to stay Stay aligned while we are working on it. Playbacks are a great way to regularly exchange feedback from sponsors, research findings, or the lessons learned just by implementing a design. It’s helpful if playbacks are presented in a narrative fashion that walks through a user journey, but regardless of style they should always follow a timeline to set a baseline of the assumptions we were operating under, the new information that has come to light, and actions that we are taking to adapt to the new information.

Sponsor Users

This is a big one, on par with the Diverse Empowered Team principle. Sponsor users are key members of that diverse empowered team. It is critical for leadership to recognize and empower these people to contribute to the design. As engineers we face a key design challenge in that we are NOT our users so our understanding of the use case is by definition flawed. Identifying sponsor users, inviting them into the design process, and adapting to their feedback is how design thinking helps us to mitigate this challenge. Engaging with sponsors can slow down design work, finding the correct sponsors and managing schedules so that we can collect and incorporate their feedback can take time, but it should not be overlooked. If you are doing time accounting, consider the time needed to engage with sponsors as a risk mitigation. These same sponsors will be using the product when it goes live, and finding and fixing problems in design is orders of magnitude less expensive that fixing them after code goes into production. Your engineers are always wanting more time to work on refactoring technical debt out of the system, give them some time.

It is difficult to overstate how important diversity in sponsorship is. A variety across age, gender, sexual-orientation, life-experience, work-background, culture, even political affiliation are all way more important than getting "computer savvy" sponsors. When building sponsorship cohorts, I like to include diversity across a variety of other spectrums that include Sr. and Jr. level staff, Technophile and Technophobe personalities, By The Book and Wild Ducks working styles.

If your finding it difficult to keep all your stakeholders aligned around what the team is working on, reach out and schedule some time so we can discuss how Team Transformation, or Product Roadmapping can help.