“First, success requires a shared sense of purpose in the entire team. The vision needs to be challenging enough for the group to have something to aspire to, but clear enough so that everyone can understand what they need to do. Second, people must be empowered by their leaders to work autonomously to achieve the team objectives. Finally, people need the space and opportunity to master their discipline, not just to learn how to achieve ‘good enough’.” 1
As Product Managers or Agile Team members, we all know how difficult it is starting a new role, especially if it’s a newly established Lean-Agile Team. Regardless which stage you are in, whether it’s a Discovery or Development Stage or what your solution area is, whether it’s a Product or Service, you can quickly find yourself in a position where you have already started working on backlog items and the roadmap before anything else. As a Product Manager, you might even feel a strong pressure or expectation in this direction from stakeholders and less-experienced team members. While less-experienced team members want to see a “requirement” like clear direction through backlog items so that they can start their activity accordingly, stakeholders want to see a Gantt Chart like Roadmap which can give them a feeling of control.
However, the starting point for a newly established Lean-Agile Team or a Lean-Agile Solution Stream2, plays a crucial role in the success of the Team and the Stream. Womack and Jones in their break-through book Lean Thinking, mentions the theatrical entry of the Japanese Senseis to plantations which were aiming to adapt Lean transformation. This “theatrical entry” had two main objectives. As it was introducing the “just-do-it” mind-set into the organization, it was also sending the right signals to employees and the whole organization.3 As a Product Manager or an experienced member of the Lean-Agile team, we are less likely to need a “theatrical entry” when we start a new role, however, we need to build the team on the right pillars and send the right messages to the team members, stakeholders and organization.
Solution Vision
“The Vision is a description of the future state of the Solution under development. It reflects customer and stakeholder needs, as well as the Feature and Capabilities proposed to meet those needs.”4 The Vision is the cement of the shared understanding of the team and stakeholders. As I experienced many times, even for relatively mature Lean-Agile Solution Streams and Teams either they didn’t have a Solution Vision Statement at all or even if there was one, in some cases, it was just a written statement on an old report which is long forgotten and never fully understood or discussed and updated by the team and stakeholders. Setting out (or updating if there is one already) a Solution Vision collaboratively through the Solution Vision Statement would be the right starting point for a newly established Lean-Agile Team or Solution Stream.
Shared Understanding
One of the main differences between the Lean-Agile mindset and the traditional plan-based approach is related to their management styles. As Humble, Molesky and O’Reilly explained in Lean Enterprise, Lean-Agile Management practices are fundamentally different from Taylorist management style. “According to Taylor, the job of management is to analyze the work and break it down into discreet tasks. These tasks are then performed by specialised workers who need to understand nothing more than how to do their particular specialized task as efficiently as possible.”5 On the other hand, the Lean-Agile approach requires “high-trust culture” where “everybody is aligned in their goals” and empowered while they are doing their work. In the Lean-Agile environment, empowered individuals have permission to fail and learn through collaboration and continuous improvement activities.
“The more a team collectively understands what they are doing and why, the less they need to debate what happened and can quickly move to how to solve for the new learning.”6 This alignment could not be possible without a shared vision and understanding. Therefore, trying to run a Solution Stream with, for example, backlog items or a roadmap without a shared vision, contradicts the Lean-Agile approach and sends wrong messages to the Team and Stakeholders.
A case study: NHSX
When we started to run Alpha Stage7 for Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services (CYPMHS) as a collaborative initiative by NHSX and Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (SABP), we had similar challenges. Under a strong time pressure, our aim was building a capability in user-centred design, research and agile way of working, as well as prototyping and testing a lot of ideas defined in the Discovery Stage.
As a newly established team, we organized a Solution Vision Workshop led by the Product Manager with the active participation from the team and stakeholders. In the workshop, we started by collaboratively thinking about our Solution Vision. This gave the team and stakeholders an opportunity to create a shared understanding around who our customers are and their ultimate problem we would aim to solve as well as key benefits we’d aim to deliver and primary differences between our current state and future state we eventually wanted to achieve.
Then we moved to the next stages when we would create a list of Alpha Objectives and Customer Problems based on the Discovery Stage findings and our understanding at the time. Before we moved to the last stage in the workshop where we brainstormed about potential backlog items (Funnel backlogs), we had grouped customer problems to see whether there is a pattern which could give us a sense of the importance and urgency among backlog items. And in the last stage of the workshop, the team and stakeholders collaboratively contributed Funnel Backlog (features, epic, stories) with the ideas of deliverables related to our Vision and Customer Problem Area so that the team could pick up some ideas from the Funnel to analyze and add into the Team Backlog and Roadmap. After the workshop, we later organized a couple of follow-up events to revisit our workshop artifacts in order to finalize our Solution Vision Statement and Alpha Objectives before iterations began.
As a team, we already knew that our Solution Workshop artifacts were “draft”, because they were based on our limited understanding at the beginning of the Solution Stream as well as the findings from the Discovery Stage. Therefore, we expected that our understanding of the customer problems and thereby, backlog items including their prioritization would be continuously evolved throughout the Solution Stream via our increasing understanding in the problem area.
Nevertheless, Solution Vision Workshop provided us with a valuable shared understanding at the beginning of the Solution Stream. During the iterations, we continued to revisit our Product Vision and Alpha Objectives as part of each Sprint Review ceremony. This revisit played a “reality check” role to see whether our activities were inline with our Vision and Objectives. It also strengthened our shared understanding. Throughout the Solution Stream, This shared understanding was a “currency” for the team members and helped them to proactively work towards the same direction regardless of their experience level in Lean-Agile practices. Even when the team had to work remotely for the last iterations due to the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic, we had full confidence in delivering high quality outcomes and outputs at a fast pace without any interruption by disagreements or long discussions around the context of backlog items.
The team worked an incremental framework and completed the Alpha Solution Stream within six iterations in eight weeks. During the Solution Stream, we implemented continuous research practices and organized seventeen customer research and co-design sessions. With an outstanding performance and dedication, the team successfully prototyped and tested tens of ideas as well as created four -as is- and -to be- end-to-end customer journey maps.
1. Lean Enterprise; Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly; O’Reilly, 2015; page: 65 ↩
2. Lean-Agile Solution Stream: Lean-Agile Initiatives in any Area (product or service), any Size (portfolio, program, team) or any Stage (discovery, development, alpha, beta) ↩
3. “On one level it was pure theatre; the Japanese visitors surely understood what an extraordinary scene they were causing. But on another level, they were prying Jacobs loose from their bureaucratic, departmentalized, batch-and-queue past. As Byrne remembers, ‘By moving those machines themselves in only a few minutes -when many hadn’t been moved in years and Jacops executives would never have dreamed of touching any machinery themselves- they demonstrated how to create flow and what a few determined individuals can do. Neither Dennis nor the rest of the Jacobs workforce was ever the same again.’” Lean Thinking; James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones; Simon & Schuster, 2003; page: 130 ↩
4. © Scaled Agile, Inc. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/vision/ ↩
5.Lean Enterprise; Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly; O’Reilly, 2015; page: 6 ↩
6.Lean UX; Jeff Gothelpf and John Seiden; O’Reilly, 2016; page: 13 ↩
7. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/how-the-alpha-phase-works ↩
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