When growing a startup product development you encounter major challenges: How do you scale your product development teams? How do you keep as fast and responsive as you used to be? And how do you leverage the existing knowledge? In this talk I’ll show a couple of practices and rituals based around a Kanban board which captured our whole product development efforts with about 30 participants. I’ll show the design of the Kanban board, the policies and meetings around it and the personal duties ranging from a developer to a product manager up to the CEO. I will also compare it to other approaches from the community and what our lessons learned are.

1. How to scale product
development when you
no longer fit in one room
Matthias Lübken
The product guy
@luebken

2. About me
• Software Developer
• Agile Coach
• Director of software
development
• Product Manager
Next generation PaaS for
grownups. Based on Docker.
Visit http://giantswarm.io

3. Our setting
• Company:
• A startup with product / market fit
• Process:
• Just do whatever works, and if you
get stuck, ask someone in the room.
• Challenge:
• Scale product development
• 1 4 teams. 7 30 colleagues.

4. Our (implicit) vision
“No process is a good process
“It’s about the people and their
interactions

5. Topics
• Cross functional teams
• Adaptive product roadmap
• Feedback in dev teams
• Continuous improvement
• Other ideas

6. (Cross) functional
teams

8. Product
Devel-opment

9. Feature
Team
Product
Devel-opment
Feature
Team
Feature
Team

10. Feature
Team
Product
Devel-opment
Feature
Team
Feature
Team
Functional
Team

11. Feature
Team
Product
Devel-opment
Feature
Team
Feature
Team
Functional
Team
Community
of practice

12. Lessons learned
• Slicing is hard
• Restructuring is painful
• Clear goal is crucial

13. Adaptive product
roadmap

14. Our Kanban Board

15. Product Jour Fixe
CPO
Developer
POs
CEO/CTO
Architect
Other
Agile Coach

16. Sprint Reviews

17. Lessons learned
• High discipline needed
• Be prepared for hard questions

18. Feedback in dev
teams

21. Lessons learned
• Be open to new ideas
• Coach teams

22. Continuous
improvement

23. If you do one thing in your process
do retrospectives. “

24. Small and big
retrospectives

25. Authority boards
see mangement30.com

26. Lessons learned
• Optimise locally and globally
• Take the time needed
• Be a good pace maker
•Make authority clear

27. Other ideas

28. No Blueprints
• Blue Prints like SAFe don’t work
• They are against all our instincts
“Dave Snowden
Put brutally SAFe seemed to be PRINCE II
camouflaged in Agile language. ... SAFe is not
only a betrayal of the promise offered by AGILE
but is a massive retrograde step giving the
managerial class an excuse to avoid any
significant change.

30. Agile Scaling Cycle
• Based principles and
working Agile teams
• "Autonomous business
facing teams taking
ownership of their process.”
@StefanRoock
• http://scaledprinciples.org/

31. Jimdo
• Created culture manual
!
> acknowledge mistakes
> have fun
!
> strive for the best
!
> ok to be crazy
!
> no deadlines
• Feel good manager
• Weekly Teamverløtung
• Goal #1
• Open Prio Meetings
http://bit.ly/jimdostory

32. Take aways
•Pick examples that fit
•Do collaborative change
•Know your runway

33. Matthias Lübken
The product guy
@luebken
It’s hard
but fun!
Next generation PaaS for
grownups. Based on Docker.
Visit http://giantswarm.io