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Unemployed Agilists: How to Increase Your Value to Get a Great Job, Part 3

Johanna Rothman

I assume you have some sort of functional product development expertise. If not, why are you in technical product development? This post is about your deep domain expertise, first in product, then in agility. First, the product-based expertise. That's often product people, testers, and some UI/UX people.

Agile 81
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Create Feedback Loops (Agile Approaches) for Hardware Products

Johanna Rothman

In Costs of an Agile Approach for Hardware Products , I suggested that an iteration-based approach for hardware was too expensive. I focused on the actual development costs. Those people work independently until they need to verify the product as a whole, works. This hardware team swarms on a product. Just like software.)

Agile 52
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Designing an Organization for a Product Approach, Part 2

Johanna Rothman

In this part, I’ll discuss an option for a product-oriented organization. Consider a Product-Oriented Organization. Instead of organizing by function, consider a product-oriented organization. Again, I am not saying this is the only way a product organization would look, but this is a possibility. What do you do?

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Agile Approaches Offer Strategic Advantage; Agile Tools are Tactics, Part 2

Johanna Rothman

Example 1: Startup/Small Organization with Few Products. They offer their product in two versions: Pro and Lite. The first was not waiting for the end of an iteration to demo or release. They demo'd every week on Wednesday mornings and then they released after the demo. Let's start with a couple of examples. Others mob.

Agile 105
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How and When to Use Timeboxes, Iterations, and Sprints to be Most Effective

Johanna Rothman

Every sprint delivers working product.” Not the thinking and learning that go into the deliverables where you end up with something demo-able, if not usable.” They do have product goals. However, they don't deliver value, have team-based planning, a review/demo, or a retrospective. ” “Oooh.”

Agile 116
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Retire These Metaphors & Reframe the Discussion to be More Effective

Johanna Rothman

For years, we've used several metaphors to describe software product development: People-based metaphors, such as: Man-weeks for all the humans working on a project or a product. Demo inside the organization. In product development, is it anyone's job to make a baby at work? Worse, the less effective we are.

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How WIP Insights Allow Us to Revisit Brooks’ Law About Adding People to a Team

Johanna Rothman

The first is that Brooks strongly suggested the idea of a “surgical team” That hierarchical team was a feature- or product-based team. Ten people, seven of them professionals, are at work on the problem, but the system is the product of one mind–or at most two, acting uno animo.”

Agile 94