Conference Experience - LeSS in Munich 2019

So I am a beginner in using agile frameworks and came to Munich for LeSS Conference for one purpose only – to find out how to quickly and effectively and painlessly make use of the framework in my own context. Simple, right?

I knew there would be a lot of inspiration – and there was! Thank you all content givers! I knew there would be many interesting discussions about different implementations in details or specific problems on the way or discovering the mindset it is great to manifest – and there were! (Some discussions/presentations ended up standing because of hot topic) I expected many experienced, positive, I-know-why-I-came people to meet and to stay in touch afterwards and I wasn’t disappointed. Finally, I hoped for great food ;) and it was de-li-cious (though still… less is more).

I also have learned that silent high five actually works for big conference, that (piano) keyboard is not designed for one player only (and pattern „one keyboard – one screen – one developer” is only my heavy bias) and that bully hen was a great team player 6 generations earlier, so promoting good teams as a whole is far better than promoting individuals in the long run.

Open Space
Discussion

Did I find answer to my initial question? Yes, quite quickly. There is no shortcut to success. The best thing I can do is to get training(s) and coach guidance. And take it with no guarantee. And then: experiment, fail, learn, experiment, learn, have something almost done, explain, fail, experiment, engage, learn, practice, come back for missed rules and principles, learn, gather data and measure, experiment, learn, do less… and once again.

This was my main learning. And I’m thankful for that. I have one year of learning ahead before the next Conference takes place. And I’m looking forward to having little success in our LeSS adoption. See you next year!

Team
Poster

My Maiden LeSS Conference Experience in Munich

It is with much trepidation and anticipation, that I decided to make the pilgrimage to Munich to attend this year’s LeSS Conference at the Paulaner am Nockherberg that happened between 12th to 13th of September, my very first. I know myself enough that travelling anywhere that wrecks havoc to my bio-clock has typically turned out torturous and eventful for me. However, I am curious as to what to expect and what I can gain attending THE annual LeSS event. There is a lot that I know that will put me into my uncomfortable zone - a brand new place I have yet to visit, a country with a language I do not speak, fresh new faces with people from countries and cultures very different from what I have grown used to in my 40 odd years growing up in Singapore.

We booked an Airbnb place, near-ish from the conference venue. I was warmly received by my Shanghai colleague, Joseph, on the early morning of 9th September, who waited at the train station, which is close to where he stays, and happens to be a short walking distance from where he currently coaches - BMW; Incidentally BMW is presently, undergoing a huge organisational transformation, to adopt LeSS, and find a better approach towards product development for their Autonomous Driving Program.

LeSS Trainers Meeting

The next 2 days for me was an eye-opener, especially from the perspective of a developer of the LeSS website. I joined the LeSS trainers meeting. I got to meet LeSS stalwarts such as Jürgen De Smet, Elad Sofer, Cesario Ramos, Ran Nyman, Wolfgang Richter and Craig Larman, which gave me first-hand interactions and feedback directly from whom cared most about the LeSS community and the LeSS website. It was obvious everyone placed a strong emphasis on building up the technical capabilities of developers, that being an important pre-cursor, before even attempting to introduce organisational changes towards LeSS. We will, therefore, be introducing a feature to allow LeSS trainers to add recommended courses and events that shepherd developers towards levelling up their technical foundations on the LeSS website.

LeSS Trainers Dinner

I turned up Day 1 of the Conference to the majestic venue of the Paulaner am Nockherberg restaurant and beer garden. It was breathtaking. Huge halls, a cosy beer garden for team events and social activities, which fit well, for the nature of the conference. My colleague, Ivan, was anxious about the potential chaos that might ensue, during Day 1 of the Conference when a large number of people would turn up at registration, encountering registration exceptions, and given his previous experience in 2018 NYC LeSS Conference. It turned out, given sufficient logical signs and directions along the Conference entrance, it quickly proved that self-organisation works. We had zero incidences of registration exceptions, and both Ivan and I ended with nothing to do at the “Registration Exception” handling table.

Registration Tips
Registration Exception Handling
No Registration Exception

Bas kicked-off the conference and shared that LeSS Conference 2020 will happen in Amsterdam. In the keynote by Cesario and Nadine that followed, on “LeSS at ING Business Lending”, they shared, how ING moved from their existing Spotify Model in their LeSS Adoption. Teams went through preparations for the transformation, attending CLPs and technical training, while dislocated teams were organised around the business lending product. They used technology to enable mob programming across geographies.

Bas' Conference Opening
LeSS Conference 2020 Amsterdam

There was a huge bazaar thereafter, that enabled people to quickly get acquainted with one another and within a short 15 minutes or so, teams with at least 5 members with maximum diversity were formed.

Conference Team Forming
Team Formation Bazaar 1
Team Formation Bazaar 2
Team Unicorns
Team 7UP

One key takeaway, after attending Michael James’ “What Are The Biggest Disadvantages of LeSS?”, is that, there is a wealth of knowledge, to be unearthed, from people in conference participants, that perhaps, has a good fiddle on what is and is not, a good thing to do, if one is to tilt an organisation, inch by inch towards becoming more agile. We learnt a lot, sharing experiences and pains, which each of us in the teams formed in the workshop, that gives us empirical evidence, of what paths, organisations have taken, that moved the needle, either away or towards being more agile.

MJ explaining his workshop

In Jacek’s talk on “Working with pain in organisational change”, I learnt that it is important to be aware of how the pains experienced by individuals during a large organisational transformation, triggered by the intricate cause and effect between our System 1 Thinking and System 2 Thinking, will, work against the best-intended efforts during a LeSS adoption. By first finding a commonly shared belief with everyone involved as a starting point - gearing teams up with technical practices training in TDD, Continuous Integration, etc, becomes useful and important, in preparing an organisation for the flip, which relies heavily, on being able to practice and execute those technical practices well.

What I learnt from Jacek's talk

I did an Open Space topic on Kent Beck’s strategy for scaling software development collaboration - Limbo, suggested by my colleague - Terry. There were a lot of discussions and questions surrounding, how the fast small diff commits of TCR proposed in Limbo, would work, where you still had to pay attention to code quality, yet, direct you towards the intended solution for a feature. There was a lot of questions surrounding how the cadence of the commits, might result in chaos with conflicts and whether refactoring, might take a back-seat, given, it may take more time and larger change-sets. I had an extended discussion over lunch with Robert Batůšek from Solar Winds, as he missed my Open Space session while attending Lv Yi’s “Number of Backlogs and Multilearning”. He is excited and eager to experiment to introduce Limbo/TCR in his coding-dojo sessions with his teams in the Czech Republic. He has been organising software craftmanship coding dojos with his teams where he works, in Solar Winds.

Open Space Topics 1
Open Space Topics 2

In a parallel Open Space topic by Michael James and Aki, they shared, how Odd-e Japan, worked with a robot companion startup. A lot of vibes and interests surrounding the hardware and software integration and sprint cycles. I see a lot of these topics and interest in quite a few other occasions in the last 6 months or so. IoT, 3D printing, and product companies that build more tangible and material products are emerging very quickly recently, that could explain, the explosion of such interests.

Open Space Story of Groovex

In Day 2, Craig talked about Chicken Breeding. A huge takeaway for me was that a lot of problems that we are faced with in organisations today, have been well studied with case studies and opinions around how you might go about tackling them. These are well-studied problem space, with well-formed opinions and knowledge that are there, for the last 3 to 4 decades. A must-read book for me, out of the session, is “Governing the Commons” by Elinor Ostrom.

Chicken Breeding

The talk by Anshul, “Banking on LeSS” struck closest to heart for me. I have spent 6 months in his organisation, helping with the LeSS Adoption, along with my colleagues Terry and Ivan. Bas had spent a year before, getting the organisation ready for the changes to come. Anshul shared, how over the last 1.5 years, the journey taken by his organisation, to adopt LeSS. A lot of training and preparations were done before they made any organisational changes. Teams were sent for CLP training, and technical training (Certified Scrum Developer courses), and working spaces were re-structured, that befits and allowed easy open space collaboration and interactions. Product owners and line managers were coached and they formed a Scrum Masters community, which were initially shunned by the managers. He shared the term NATO - “No Action Talk Only”, which were used by managers to describe the scrum masters community. That brought about many chuckles from the audience.

Banking on LeSS - Scrum Masters Community
Banking on LeSS - Technical Challenges Forum

Reflecting on my 2 days at the conference and 2 days at the LeSS Trainer meeting, I miss the Italian food in Munich ! There is a lot of energy and interest surrounding LeSS and the vibrancy of the communities in Europe is invigorating. I was pleasantly surprised to see fellow Singaporeans, who had flown 12 hours to Munich, to attend the Conference, some as speakers, others as attendees. Good to hear about their expectations and experiences over the last 2 days. I, came across, a couple of interesting individuals - a Physicist who is now a Finance Manager, a Chemist turned Agile Coach, an Electrical Engineer turned team scrum master, etc. Wasps at the beer garden during mealtime and social events were a constant annoyance for me. Those filled Oktoberfest Beer Mug were not good for tiny Singaporean arm and wrist of mine. All in all, meeting people, sharing experiences, sharing what an idea means and what each of us heard, from the conference, was a huge huge gift to offset my to-be yet again, jet-lagged body !

Conference Learning Experience Game
Food...Glorious Food
Lunch with new friend
Bavarian Dinner

LeSS Conference Experience - Munich 2019

Last week I had a pleasure (and pain :)) of attending Less Conference in Munich. Here are a few words why it is such a great experience and why I would recommend it to anyone working within a team.

Firstly - it was a team-based event. It was my first experience of such a formula. I couldn’t have imagined how it would affect my learning abilities. By the 2 p.m. on the first day, my brain capacity was reaching its limits (hence the pain part :)) and then I’ve learned some more. I don’t know how but the atmosphere made it possible.

Tremors

The second reflection I had was about the people. Wow. Just Wow. Being a Scrum Master for 3+ years I thought I had at least some things figured out. Well maybe, but being in the presence of practitioners with this amount of experience just knocked my socks off. When I overcame the feeling of being so small in comparison, I took a lot with me. From the calm mentoring from Less Trainers (Craig, Greg, Wolfgang and others) giving me a different perspective on the ideas I was kind of stuck with, to the empathetic connections we all made during workshops and talks regarding our everyday challenges. Also from the great Team, I had the joy to work with - Tremors.

Lastly - I’ve made a few connections in my mind that I think wouldn’t have happened any other way. I can honestly say it was one of my career-changing moments. I got inspired and I feel I have the guidance that I was looking for.

I am very thankful for this experience - unlike any other. It was evolving on many levels. You can not deny the amount of substantial knowledge you could get but for me, it was all about the emotional journey I needed to take.

My Learnings

On Product Manager in the Team

(by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman)

On Product Manager in the Team

This post is the second in a series related to product management and product teams. Like the previous post, this one is partly influenced by Marty Cagan’s article on “Product Teams” vs “Feature Teams”. Marty seems to see the role of Product Manager different than we do, but the difference is probably more about the team than about the Product Manager. That said, this post is especially influenced by the frequent recurring question, “Should a Product Manager be on the Team?”

Being on the Team in LeSS

First, let us clarify that a little bit by exploring what “part of the Team” means in LeSS.

The Team has a shared responsibility for the result of a Sprint. A shared responsibility means that, even though people on the team probably have a primary specialization and a preferred focus area (which may not be the same, because of learning), all of the members of the team are responsible for all the work that the team does. In practice, this results in vague boundaries between the individual team members primary specialization, and in some teams not even a meaningful distinction.

A Team in LeSS (and Scrum) is also self-managing. What’s the implication of that on a team taking a shared responsibility? Key point: the team will need to have (1) a clear shared goal, (2) at the same time. We want to stress the temporal aspect here as it is rarely discussed but really important! When a new self-managing team is formed in which previously the team members were used to traditional siloed single-function roles, then if they continue that pattern, the team will struggle with finding ways to parallelize their work. The first and easiest questions is, how can we test before the implementation is done? Then, the same question needs to be answered related to the other roles that used to work in a sequential lifecycle with handoff, “How can we do the UI design at the same time as the implementation?”, “How can we do the analysis at the same time as the implementation”.

The fundamental problem that self-managing teams with shared responsibility have to solve is: How can we together in parallel work on activities that were previously considered sequential?

What would it mean if the Product Manager were part of the team?

When a Product Manager is part of the team, it will mean that the Product Management responsibilities are a shared responsibility within the team. However, one problem to solve here is that a significant amount of Product Management activities usually do not – or even can’t – happen at the same time as the activities of the rest of the Team for the selected work in the Sprint. This is mostly because of the delayed feedback of some of these activities. For example, if a Product Manager is out observing users or talking with them, then this activity is usually not at the same time and for the same goal as what the team is working on right now.

Just to be clear, we are not saying that it’s good that Product Managers don’t work on the same goals at the same time as the Team, we are simply observing that this is often so, and that it’s hard to change that in the context of the customers they work with and the organization they work in.

Considering this, we have seen two common alternatives of Product Management working with the team:

Product Manager as part of the team

This means the whole team takes on Product Management responsibilities (not just the person with Product Management preference). The team together discusses how to get closer to customers, understand them better, emphasize better, and discover potential new outcomes to achieve or new features to create.

It is likely to happen that the Product Management activities do not directly relate directly to the other work selected in the Sprint. In that case, the team needs to cope with the temporal differences, the work selected in the Sprint and the Product Management responsibilities related to understanding the customer, without creating separate roles within the team. For example, the entire team gets together at the beginning of the Sprint (Sprint Planning 2) to understand the Product Management activities and decides how they together are going to work on these.

Note that there is a similarity and overlap between Product Management activities and Product Backlog Refinement. Product Backlog Refinement is similar look-ahead work. A difference is that it is often possible to do Product Backlog Refinement work with the entire team together while it might not be feasible to always send the entire team to the customer (though maybe that’s not a bad idea…)

Product Manager who works with a team

Although in LeSS we love the Product Manager – and hence Product Management responsibility – to be part of the team, in practice we often see a Product Manager working with teams. In this case, the Product Manager focuses on Product Management activities (such as competitor and market analysis, and much more) and helps the teams to understand the market, customer, and problems to solve. Sometimes a Product Manager might work very close with one or several teams for a long time when the team works with customers or features that they know most about. However, in that case the Product Management responsibilities are not (yet) fully shared within the team.

In some cases, this is a first step to eventually moving the Product Management responsibilities into the team. In other cases, that won’t happen because (1) the focus of the team changes whereas the focus of the Product Management might not (e.g. in case the Product Manager is focused on a particular customer or customer segment), or (2) the Product Manager’s responsibility is intrinsically hard to share in the team, which might be the case when there’s lots of travel and customer relationships that needs to be maintained.

Conclusion

So, should the Product Manager be a part of the team? Which also means, should Product Management be a shared responsibility in the team? If you can do that, great! Alternatively, Product Managers can work with the team to help them understand the customers better.

On the Product Owner Role

Final note: We are talking about Product Management here and not the role of Product Owner. In LeSS, the Product Owner focuses on overall Product vision, prioritization, and investment decisions. In product companies, the Product Owner tends to be one senior person from a Product Management group, but not all Product Managers will be Product Owners.

On "Product Teams" and "Feature Teams"

(by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman)

On “Product Teams” and “Feature Teams”

This post has its origins in a post by Marty Cagan at https://svpg.com/product-vs-feature-teams/ in which he compares what he calls “product teams” with what he calls “feature teams.” We’re not quite sure where Marty’s definition of “feature team” originates from, as what he calls “product team” seems to be more like a feature team to us than his definition.

That said, the article is strong even when some of the reasoning is weak.

Weak Reasoning

logic weakness - Marty sets up his own definition of feature team (a straw man) and argues against his own definition; i.e. an argument from false premises.

logic weakness - Notice how the article’s argument is framed: either (1) you have “product teams” that are empowered and focus on outcomes, or (2) you have “feature teams” that aren’t. This is an example of the “false dichotomy” logic/argument fallacy, so widespread that we highlighted seeing this as a major thinking tool in the first LeSS book. And of course our suggestion is to consider more options beyond the false binary. For example, here’s a radical idea: How about a team in a large product group that can either be empowered to focus on an outcome with their own innovative discoveries, or that can take on a presented feature request and implement it? Mind… blown!

term weakness - Perhaps the name “product team” is more attractive to you. But notice that the name strongly suggests – although we acknowledge it doesn’t enforce – to the naive ear the idea that the team is creating their (narrow) product. For a fresh 7-people start-up with one team working on the Product, this is fine. For a growing start-up or a larger organization, these many narrow small “products” leads to a profound sub-optimization at the global level in terms of working on highest value, the switching cost of adapting to work on another existing “product”, lack of global vision and alignment, and difficulty of multiple teams to work together on a larger broader product.

You might think, it is just a term. But if you work for a long time in organizational development, you will notice that the choice of terms and the widespread misunderstandings that will arise from those choices is more influential than you might have imagined. We predict that “product team” will easily over time and space get misinterpreted as “each team has a product.”

Note: “feature team” suffers from similar weaknesses, as Marty’s article proves. The main reason for sticking to the term “feature team” is historical. The original use of the term in in Microsoft’s Visual C++ v1 and Ericsson’s AXE basestation – two wildly successful products. Also, we keep using the term because of our failure to find a better one.

Strong Points with which We Heartily Agree

That said, beyond these weaknesses, the article is reasonably good and there are some points that are really important and with which we strongly agree:

  • The article reminds everyone of the importance of focus on the customer. Teams involved in building great products need to focus on the customer, understand the customer, live the customer.
  • It reminds everyone the most productive feature teams focus on outcome and not on output, and with the freedom to innovate to achieve the outcome (thus the LeSS Guide: More outcome, less output). Teams become much stronger when you give them problems to solve than when you give them tasks to implement.
  • It raises some important Product Management dysfunctions that we also frequently encounter.

The article also raises some other questions, which we will discuss in a follow up post. Specifically the question on whether a Product Manager should be a part of the Team. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t trivial and hence another post… “On Product Manager in the Team.”