Conal Scanlon
For other QCon blog posts, see QCon live blog table of contents
Discovery vs Delivery
- Delivery: completing lots of tickets, points completed, happy team
- Discovery – different goals
- Two types of work; two different ways of thinking
- Dual track agile – discovery is for learning. Inputs into delivery track.
- Discovery will happen whether planning to do it or not. ex: bug report
- Can change % of tie on discovery vs delivery over phase in project
Cynefin
- Welsh word
- Complex/Chaotic/Complicated/Obvious
- Also box in middle for when don’t know which in.
- Complicated – can use knowledge to see what to do
Key areas of discovery work
- Maximize learning – accelerate discovery, MPVs
- Want to encounter problems as quickly as possible
- Learning is messy and doesn’t easily fit Scrum process
- MVP goal – maximize learning while minimizing risk and investment
- MVPs can be paper prototype or a single use case
- Better ideas – idea flow, collective intelligence
- Levels: Psychology safety, dependability, structure & clarity, meaning, impact
- Validate with people outside team
- Closer relationships with specific customers so can see reaction as progress
- Alignment – OKRs, Briefs, Roadmap
- OKR = objective and key results
- Think about where want to go and how get there
- Should understand why vs an aspirational goal
- Alignment and autonomy are orthogonal
- Product brief – map from strategic level to feature going to build. It is not a requirements or architectural doc
- Roadmap – show on larger ranges of time
- Metrics – 3 levels, correct category (delivery vs discovery)
- Business, product and engagement metrics.
My impression
I like that he provided an outline with the key points up front. The OKR section was detailed with examples. I like that there were book references/recommendations. And it was certainly interesting. I think I expected it to be about something else, but I’m glad I came. I would have liked more on examples of discovery projects specifically.