Todd Lankford

A team, that I had recently coached, wanted to improve the time it took to deliver product features to their customer. It was taking on average six months to deliver a working feature.

They were working on many product features in parallel. When they faced an obstacle, they would start a new feature. Obstacles would sit unresolved. Each team member was working alone on their own feature. They were working as a collection of individuals rather than a team. As a result, value throughput was sluggish.

I coached them to try swarming (a drastic change). In this technique, the team only allows one feature to be processed at a time. All team members collaborate on the chosen feature. They stop and remove obstacles immediately when encountered and focus on delivering the feature as fast as possible.

Within two weeks of coaching them, they accomplished an amazing feat. The team delivered a feature in two weeks that used to take six months in the old way.

Now, their behavior has generated impressive results fast. Their belief changed. The old way of working is no longer considered.

They don’t even call it “swarming” anymore. It is now how they work. It is the new normal.

When joining the team, they were overproducing and not focused on an end-to-end system. Delivery to the end-user was nowhere in sight and had been delayed numerous times.

I coached them through a lean, agile delivery approach that focused on a minimum viable end-to-end system that users could start using immediately.

I also coached four scrum teams and product management to utilize lean and agile techniques. We refined their grooming and delivery to think lean and provide fast feedback. We also defined what it meant to be ready and done and engaged all teams in the process.

The result was eye-opening. The group was able to get control of their product and deliver something useful to their users in four months. They stopped over-producing features and started providing the right product for their users.

The onboarding skyrocketed, and they added 187 users to the platform within a couple of months of launch.

I implemented a user-focused, agile delivery method that allowed a team to deliver a greenfield working product to users in three months. Initially, this was estimated to be a year-long effort.

By putting the customer as the central force in maximizing product value, I could coach this team away from a path that was solely focused on the delivery of feature after feature against a plan.

We engaged the team directly with the customer. The team focused on maximizing a positive customer outcome instead of maximizing how many features were shipped by date and budget.

This resulted in moving the team towards a collective product ownership mindset. Through engagement with the customer, the team was able to eliminate 75% of the original scope to focus on precisely what the customer needed. This allowed the team to deliver in 1/4 the time originally estimated.

The key difference was not assuming every product feature idea was needed. We tested our ideas and validated or invalidated them directly with the customer before building working software.