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Creating a Release Plan
- Weekly velocity defines sprint capacity
- How many sprints will give us a release?
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Calculating your initial velocity
- Get the team to guess how long it would take to deliver a release
- Split work into weeks
- Assign story points based on relative effort
- Run for a week and calculate actual velocity
- Internal Releases are PSIs (Potentially Shippable Increment)
- External Releases are Releases
- Good idea to have at least one hardening iteration leading up to a release
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Release cadence
- 4-5 iterations followed by a hardening iteration
- Releases should not be a big deal - it's something we do all the time
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Best/Worst Case Planning
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For 3 sprints
- Highest number of points
- Lowest number of points
- Calculate average worst & best capacity
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The Agile Release Train
- How do you scale agile across multiple teams and get them all pulling in the same direction?
- Continuous integration across multiple products and components
- Don't integrate the whole system late
- Don't let the slowest component drag the train
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Initial Backlog
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What Goes on the Product Backlog?
- User Requirements
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Technical Requirements
- Infrastructure
- Platform
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Bugs
- Keep to a limit
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Creating Your Initial Product Backlog
- Single Source of Requirements
- Constantly Evolving
- Ordered Based on Value
- Estimated by the Development Team
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Primary Role
- Ensure we are building the right thing
- Help position the development team for success in the iteration. For if they fail, you fail together.
- Deliver business value as economically as possible
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Responsibilities
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Manage economics
- Single release ROI
- Multi-release ROI
- Participate in planning
- Groom the product backlog
- Define acceptance criteria and verify that they are met
- Collaborate with the development team
- Collaborate with the stakeholders
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Characteristics
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Domain skills
- Is a visionary
- Knows not everything can be anticipated
- Has business and domain expertise
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People skills
- Has a good relationship with stakeholders
- Is a negotiator/consensus builder
- Is a good communicator
- Is a powerful motivator
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Decision making
- Is empowered to make decisions
- Is willing to make hard decisions
- Is decisive
- Takes an economic view to balance business/technical issues
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Accountability
- Accepts responsibility for the product
- Is committed and available
- Acts like a Scrum team member
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Patterns
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Do
- Say what needs to get done
- Challenge the team
- Get interested in building a high-performance team
- Practice business-value-driven thinking
- Protect the team from outside noise
- Incorporate change between sprints
- Continuously deliver value
- Focus on capabilities
- Fix broken windows
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Don't
- Say how to do it or how much it will take
- Bully the team
- Focus on the short-term deliveries only
- Stick to the original scope and approach "no matter what"
- Gold plate
- Not pay down technical debt
- Waterfall the iteration
- Worry the team with changes that might happen, until they become real
- Allow change to creep into sprints
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Prioritising the backlog
- Independent User Value
- Iteration/(time) value
- Risk reduction
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Determining Business Value
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Saving Money
- Retain Existing Customers
- Reduce Costs
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Making Money
- Increase Revenue
- Attract New Customers
- ROI (Value/Effort)
- Feature Grouping
- Politics/Customer Demands
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Value Estimation
- Effort Points
- Value Points
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Fixed Pool
- 1 - 100
- Increments of 100 up to 1000
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Enterprise Product Backlog
- Doing the most valuable work no matter which product it is in
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Product Manager vs. Product Owner
- Product Manager is market facing
- Product Owner is solution facing
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Planning Principles
- Can't get the plans right up front
- Up-front planning should be helpful without being excessive
- Keep planning options open until the last responsible moment
- Focus more on adapting and replanning than on conforming to a plan
- Correctly manage the planning inventory/WIP
- Favor smaller and more frequent releases
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Plan to learn fast and pivot when necessary
- A course correction to test a new hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth
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Planning Levels
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Portfolio
- Years
- Stakeholders & Product Owners
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Which products to work on, in what order, and for how long
- Portfolio backlog and collection of in-process products
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Optimise for lifecycle profits
- Calculate the cost of delay
- Linear
- Large fixed cost
- Must do now
- Fixed date
- Logarithmic
- Intangible
- Estimate for accuracy, not precision
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Product
- Halves
- Product Owner and Stakeholders
- Create a rough vision & plan for the creation of a product
- Product vision, roadmap, and high-level features
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Release
- Quarters
- Entire Scrum team and Stakeholders
- Making scope, date, and budget trade-offs for incremental deliveries
- Release plan
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Sprint
- Weekly
- Entire Scrum team
- Next level of just-in-time detailed planning around delivering a feature
- Sprint goal and sprint backlog
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Daily
- Every day
- ScrumMaster and Development Team
- The most detailed level of planning occurs during the team’s daily scrum meeting
- Inspection of current progress and adaption of how best to organise the upcoming day's work
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Sprint Zero
- Product Vision
- Initial Product Backlog
- Initial Release Plan
- Architecture Approach & Coding Practices
- Continuous Integration Environment
- Small Product Increment
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Envisioning / Product Planning
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Product Vision
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Creating a Product Vision
- Target Market
- Business Need / Opportunity
- Key Features
- Value to the Company
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Qualities
- Broad and Inspiring
- Clear and Stable
- Short and Sweet
- Highly Visible
- Frequently Revisited
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Areas of Stakeholder Value
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Entry Conditions
- Achieve parity with competition
- Deliver minimum required features
- Get compliant (SOX, FDA, HIPAA)
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Enablement
- Target a new market
- Enable sales of other products or services
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Differentiator
- Differentiate from competitors
- Delight the customer
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Spoiler
- Eliminate competitors' differentiator
- Raise the parity bar
- Redefine the game by changing market focus
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Cost Reducer
- Shorten time to market
- Reduce the number of people or their time allocation
- Improve margins
- Increase expertise
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Formats
- Elevator Pitch
- Product Datasheet
- Product Packaging
- User Conference Slides
- Press Release
- Magazine Review
- Epic-Level Product Backlog Creation
- Knowledge Acquisition
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Product Roadmap Definition
- Release Schedule
- Market Events
- Architecture Map
- Feature/Benefit Map
- Market Map
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Minimum Releasable Features
- Minimum Marketable Features
- Minimum Viable Product
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Guidelines for economically sensible envisioning
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Target a realistic confidence threshold
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Setting the bar too high has economic consequences
- More time is spent envisioning - delays product delivery
- More money is spent during envisioning
- Creates wasteful inventory of not-yet-validated artifacts
- Provides only the illusion of increased certainty
- Increases risk of making bad decisions using low-value information
- Focus on a short horizion
- Act quickly
- Pay for validated learning
- Use incremental/provisional funding
- Learn fast and pivot
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Estimating
- An estimate is not a guarantee of delivery
- Smaller things are easier to estimate than larger things
- Estimating with Time Boxes
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Story Points
- High Level Estimate of Size
- Based on a Relative Scale
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Estimated as a Team
- New teams can estimate a medium as a 5, then relatively estimate other stories based on that first story
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Planning Poker
- Avoids Anchoring
- Everyone has an equal voice
- Not Based on Duration
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Fibonacci Sequence
- 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, ?