How to Excel as an Agile Customer

Leader: Gil Broza Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

General Overview: Product managers and business analysts are often thrown into the Scrum Product Owner role with minimal preparation. Without properly seeing how to evolve a product, how to make commitments while eschewing predictions, and how to restructure their daily activities, they flounder. Most can barely make time for the team, let alone produce useful stories. Before long, they start feeling bad and overwhelmed by their various commitments.

If you are a product manager, interaction designer, analyst, domain architect, or usability specialist, you are an Agile Customer. (One of these roles is typically designated as the lead, or Product Owner.) You must absolutely grasp the Agile principles, understand their responsibilities, and know your role beyond "rank stories in a backlog". As a properly trained Agile Customer, you'll be able to plan a project that delights your users and satisfies your stakeholders.

After this course, you, the Agile Customer, will know exactly what to do and what to avoid. You'll become truly effective, confident, and relaxed in your role. You'll understand exactly how to plan a project of any size, what commitments you can make, and how to work effectively with the delivery team(s). You will have a consistent, flexible methodology that produces valuable, measurable results.

Course goals:

• Get hands-on experience with the daily practices of Product Owners and other Agile Customers
• Embrace the adaptive, evolutionary mindset and the principles that enable true agility
• Understand the factors that are critical to your Agile project's success
• Work collaboratively and effectively with delivery teams

Intended Audience: Product owners, product managers, interaction designers, analysts, domain architects, usability specialists, and testers. The class size limit for this course is 12 participants.

Gil Broza has been using, teaching and perfecting these techniques for many years. Expect a highly interactive and practical course!

Outline/At a Glance (Not an agenda):

• Principles, premises and background
• Roles and responsibilities
• You are not alone: The customer team
• Agile project chartering
• Agile project lifecycle
• Agile planning
• Effective backlog creation and management
• User Stories in depth -- including those pesky technical ones
• Crafting acceptance criteria and understanding "done"
• Agile testing (including storytesting and verification)
• Evolutionary design
• Simplicity
• Working effectively with the delivery team
• "It's not just for new features"
• Risks, success factors and challenges for Agile projects
• Optional: Being a customer in a multiple-product or program situation

Note: A simulation of an Agile project is included if most of the participants have no prior exposure to Agile.

Length of workshop: 2 days