There is no silver bullet for Product and Business Agility.
On this talk you will know which are the fundamentals and some of the initiatives in place in the OutSystems Engineering Journey to better responding rapidly and flexibly to ours customers demands.
2. You go home with 3 fundamentals
to improve agility
Goal for Today
3. Pedro Teixeira
Product Agility Coach
Engineering
160+ people
My path until today
First Encounter
with Agile
Software
Engineer
Product
Owner/Manager
2003
2008
2013
2018
4. 1 go to www.slido.com
2 Use the code: 7318
3 Choose your occupation
No login required
5-10 sec until you start
typing the question
I want to know you too
12. OutSystems is a low-code platform that allows
developers to build web and mobile applications
It’s a kind of “Visual Studio” to develop applications.
But we allow to do it visually and much faster!
13. For 3 years everything has
changed in the way
OutSystems builds the product
14. We had
2-year roadmap
No Product Owner role
No Experience role
Super Managers
No Agile Methodology
Now
Quarterly roadmap
Product Manager proxy
Experience Owner proxy
Managers (still super though)
OutScrum and….
15. 1 3
Get a North Star
Don’t measure
success 2
Solution
Problem
Major problems in some self-called Agile teams
16. Get a North Star
Examples
● Increase Adoption from 200 to
500k users
● Reduce page load from 3 to 1
sec
● Avg records created per
account
A short objective that is meaningful and measurable
17. Decide with evidences
Examples
● Success Metrics
● Usage Metrics
● Insights from interviews
Try to measure (learn) from every thing you do
Avoid subjectivity and bias.
18. 2
Get a North Star
Don’t measure success Don’t aim to learn fast
Solution
Problem
Experiment and learn
fast
Major problems in some self-called Agile teams
3
19. Two powerful statements
1 - I don’t know if this the right problem
2 - I’m not sure if we are building it in the right way
20. Development
focuses on quality
Discovery
focuses on fast learning and validation
Low confidence backlog
Ideas, hypothesis, experiments
Somewhat confidence backlog
“potentially shippable software”
Dual Track Agile
It’s an approach in software development that assumes two co-
existing tracks
22. Discovery is a process that precedes agile development
No. It’s part of the Development.
Dual Track Agile Pitfalls
All work moves from discovery to development
It doesn’t.
The discovery team is different than the development team
It shouldn’t be.
Dual Track Agile is not two teams
Ensure aligning moments.
23. Get a North Star
Experiment and learn
fast
Don’t measure success
Learning only with
product
Solution
Problem
Promote easy
alignment and guide
their maturity journey
Major problems in some self-called Agile teams
3Teams are
overwhelmed
Recurrent meetings
Autonomous teams
Constraints
Flows
Principles
24. Align people is the hardest
and most consuming thing in organizations
25. Meetings
● Syncs
● Demos
● Sales calls
● Presentations
● Random stuff
● Scrum-related
Answering all sort of questions
● Why are we working on this
● What’s going to be on our next
release
● Why is that taking so long
Align people is the hardest
and most consuming thing in organizations
27. Managers
Share the learnings
Risk management
Roadmap status
Customers
Release cadence
Call with the same every month
Call with any every week
Internal stakeholders
Discovery findings
Feedback on what you built
Value and technical
dependencies
Monthly Every 2 weeks Anytime
Schedule recurring meetings
28. Autonomous Teams with Constraints
● They are mandated to take
decisions
● Responsible for the full journey
● Avoid handovers
30. Constraints
● Taxes all teams must pay
● Ease alignment with others teams expectations
● Guided to achieve what matters
Autonomous teams with constraints
31. Examples of constraints
● Review at the end of every sprint
● No High-Priority bug longer than 1 month on the backlog
● Have a quarter North Star
● Release every month
○ Ensure a learning point
Autonomous teams with constraints
39. Pedro Teixeira
Product Agility Coach
Twitter @_pteixeira
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/teixeirapedro
Personal Blog http://napkin-talks.com
Thank you for being here
