Agile & Beyond 2024

May 14-15th, 2024
Detroit, MI

Keynote: Beyond the Build Trap: Becoming Truly Product-Led

Escaping the Build Trap (2018) - focus on outcomes, not outputs.

“Product-Led” is often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean that product managers are now in charge or make all of your company’s decisions. It means that your product is the focus of your company and its growth.

“We’re doing the process. But where is the value?”

We’re all good at working in smaller contexts, in silos. But not at thinking big. (Like different stations in a kitchen that aren’t coordinating to produce a complete dish.)

Different ways of doing lead to different ways of thinking (not the other way around).

There have been 282,085 layoffs since 2023.

Companies overhired–they were trying to make everything instead of prioritizing, focusing.

Product Strategy

There is often a gap between a company’s Vision and its Solutions, where its Strategy should be. To fill this gap, the company’s many departments independently come up with their own individual strategies.

Product Strategies are Business Strategies.

Product Kata (like the Toyota Kata)

Understand the direction
Analyze the current state <–we often skip or skimp on this part
Set the next goal
Execute toward that goal

The Product Kata is not just for teams, it should happen at every level in an org. Leaders tend to think they don’t need to do this.

Product Operations

Tech teams need to help free the business and market data needed to analyze the current state.

Q: How can I get leaders to __ ? A: Do not tell them they’re “doing it wrong”. A few more engaging tactics:

Ask them a question about the business or market that they don’t know the answer to. When they realize they don’t know, they’ll become curious.
Survey different people/teams about what they think the strategy is–reveal to them that no one agrees on it

It’s the end of Agile as we know it, and I feel fine

with Dustin Thostenson

“This is not another “Agile is Dead” talk.”

Matt Barcomb’s Key Forces

Avoid using the word “agile”.

Plant seeds + Book club (simple variation: have someone read + summarize each chapter for the group, rotating) + One-on-one meetings + Dojos

Make Stone Soup–ask for their help, lightly.

Add a “prefactoring” column before dev to Make the Change Easy. Compare cumulative flow diagrams before and after.

Solving the Technical Debt Crisis

with Tom Meloche

Some developers can do in 4,000 lines of code what others do in 400,000. These extra lines of code a burden on our industry that siphons value and prevents innovation.

We’ll be able to fix this now, with AI.

“I’ve been waiting for this for 20 years.”

The key to agility is good code. Extreme Programmers were focused on this long before (and since!) “Agile”.

AI is better at refactoring code than generating new code.

What if 3h of refactoring work could now be done reliably in under 15m? With your existing team/talent?

This got better yesterday! (GPT 4o was released on 5/14)

Should you rewrite your system?

Only if you’re really going to do it differently, with new knowledge and techniques. And with a team of, like, 3 really smart people.

Bad incentives create bad teams create bad code.

Story: a tight team of 3 getting saddled with 15 offshore developers, because business people insisted that 18 people would be faster. Also, managers are rewarded by how many people report to them. sigh

When do we refactor?

Keep it under the radar! Don’t ask for permission. Don’t tell anyone outside the team you’re doing it. Just clean it!

Positive ROI should be measurable, though–capture numbers and share them. Translate it into dollars.

On AI: “The less you know about how it was built, the better.”