Product Discovery & Business Agility Workshop

• Are you stuck in your agile transformation and feel that you have hit the rock-bottom?
• Do you feel that a multi-year ROI on your agile transformation efforts is not positive?
• Do you think that your organization got trapped in a vicious cycle of fake “productization” but all you see are same-old components and applications being renamed into “products”?
• Do you feel that some new, emerging trends (e.g. “agile for non-IT”, “business agility”) are shifting everyone’s focus from real organizational problems?
• Do you wish to slowly get back on-track and resurrect the authenticity of true agility?

This workshop-style training is based on the assumption that you have achieved a certain degree of organizational design awareness and understand/have control of certain important organizational enablers (e.g. HR and budgeting) that define organizational dynamics.
Note: Such awareness is typically achieved through organizational design and system thinking training – Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)By now, you are pretty comfortable with explaining to your colleagues and executive management what local optimization is and how it manifests itself in organizational and teams’ structure, roles/responsibilities, backlogs, engineering practices, and more.At this time, you want to understand how your existing knowledge can help shifting your organization’s focus from projects, programs and portfolios to products.  You also want to avoid some of the most commonly seen omissions and misappropriations of terms and definitions (a.k.a. “fake productization“), while defining customer-centric products.

This training will take you through a few important steps/phases, required for an improved product definition. You will walk away with a good understanding of organizational reality, better grasp of the concept “what is a real product?” and some light-weight tools-templates, that could be put to use during your day-to-day work.

 

Course Agenda:

This course shall help you with:

• Understanding fundamentals of customer centricity and product focus
• Demystifying the concept of business agility, by tying it closely to product centricity
• Understanding some most common pitfalls in product definition:
  • Treating components and applications, as “products“
  • Depending on traditional org structure (tech)
  • Depending on traditional org structure (biz)
  • Depending on HR norms and policies (compensation, career path)
  • Depending on tooling configurations and complex frameworks
• Canvasing a product:
  • Vision, mission, strategic objectives
  • Funding/Budgeting/Sponsorship
  • Costs/Expenses/Investments
  • Sales/Marketing/Promotion
  • Measurements/Metrics
  • Customers/Users/Target Groups
  • Partnerships/Benefits
  • Components, applications, interfaces, layers, etc.
• Mapping Customer Journeys
  • Identifying steps a customer goes through, as (s)he makes a journey (travels) through a product
  • Understanding commonly used ‘elements’ of a customer journey (e.g. Intentions | Expectations | Ideas | Activities | Perceptions/Feelings | Touchpoints | Risks | Opportunities)
• Mapping User Stories
• Optimizing Product Definition:
  • Expanding and narrowing
  • Reverse-engineering (“Bricks & Snakes” exercise)
• Defining of DONE (DoD)

Additional Details :

In this training, attendees will be offered a mix of theoretical and practical knowledge, to help them with defining their own product(s?), and subsequently, identifying steps that are necessary to achieve the state of an improved organizational design and teams’ structure.  Students will be encouraged to bring to class their specific examples and cases.

Note: Prior to attending this course, you will be encouraged to do some self-study, to make the best out of the course agenda.