Debo Olaosebikan @dolaoseb describes 5 Core Principles in his blog post “Big Winners Start Small“
- Understand what users desperately want
- Test your understanding with cheap experiments
- Measure what’s important
- Build as little as possible
- Move fast and iterate
And a Roadmap to Go from Big to Small
- Create Small Projects
- Form Small Teams
- Differentiate between Product Management and Project Management
- Leverage Existing Technologies and Tools
- Nurture Entrepreneurial Teams
My comments
I like the roadmap, and in my experience for this change to work, you need to change the organizational constraints around “Projects” which include funding of them.
For me, that means I would start with “0.a Remove Legacy Management Practices” and then “0.b Differentiate between Product Management and Project Management”
At the end it would look like the following.
Roadmap
- Work with Management: What is hindering the value stream?
- What legacy management practice is hindering your employees?
- Where do we create value? Where are we just busy?
- Work with Management: How does money flow?
- What do we incentivize?
- Where is our focus and what do we measure?
Internal metrics or external customer-centric metrics? - What are Projects? What are Products?
- Work with 1 Team: How can we make it work in the small?
- Create 1 Small Team with external customer access
- Establish Trust in your organization
I wrote a german article about: Why the management doesn’t trust the development teams.
- Work with multiple Teams: How can we scale this approach?
- What is the common goal and vision?
- What is the network of supporting people for the teams?
- Nurture Entrepreneurial Innovative Teams
And remember:
Kanban and Scrum don’t matter.
Your process doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you have a process to improve your process.