Mastering Professional SCRUM 4/7
Ch4. Improving Value Delivered
Also Read: Previous Chapter. Ch03 | Next Chapter. Ch05 | Entire book
“the vast majority of [new ideas] fail in experiments, and even experts often misjudge which ones will pay off. At Google and Bing, only about 10% to 20% of experiments generate positive results. At Microsoft as a whole, one-third prove effective, one-third have neutral results, and one-third have negative results.”
https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-surprising-power-of-online-experiments
Most features are rarely or never used. The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham (Addison-Wesley, 2018)
Various related techniques help the team shape and reinforce their identity:
- Product value. Knowing the value in a tangible way (e.g., revenue, market share, customer satisfaction) goes a long way toward instilling a sense of purpose.
- Personas. Personas help a team understand users and customers better, so as to develop empathy for them. This ultimately helps team members see the purpose in their work and create better solutions.
https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/10-tips-agile-personas/.
https://gamestorming.com/empathy-mapping/ - Product Roadmap. A Product Roadmap is a visual representation of the high-level plan intended to help a team see the direction of the product over time.
Scrum Teams can measure the value they deliver in a variety of ways:
General measures of customer happiness:
- Net Promoter Score
- Revenue or profitability per customer
- Repeat customer business
- Reduction in total cost of ownership
- Improved conversion rates
- Growth in number of customers or users
- Customer referrals
Achievement of business goals:
- Market share
- Aggregate revenue or profit
- Cost to obtain a new customer
- Reduction in cycle time, reductions in inventory on hand, cost savings, or increases in market share
Specific measures of customer results:
- Time saved for the customer to achieve a goal
- Frequency of feature usage
- Duration of feature usage
- Number of customers or users using a feature
- Transaction completion/abandon rates
- Involve others.
- Make measures visible.
- Talk about measures and results in Sprint Reviews.
- Relate measures and results back to business goals.
- Persona is fictional character often created through market research data and customer interviews.
- Outcomes are the goals of the Personas.
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/extending-impact-mapping-gain-better-product-insights
Hypothesis-Driven Development (HDD) is a way of expressing PBIs in a way that makes the persona, outcome, measurement, and expected result explicit. Here it is an example:
We believe [doing this = Feature]
for [these people = Personas]
will achieve [this outcome = Outcome].
We will know that this it true when we see [this measurement = Measure] changed.
The 3 Cs of User Stories:
- The Card, which is simply a reminder to have Conversations.
- The Conversation, which is the actual discussion about the topic mentioned on the card.
- The Confirmation, which are the actual tests that prove it works.
