For years, our lead product manager worked in several London-based, fast-growing startups in his capacity as Agile coach, and Product Owner. These are the lessons he learned on making ‘agile’ — including Scrum as a framework — work in a fast-growing startup.
Misconception #1: ‘Agile’ Equals return on investment
Let's discuss our experience in Scrum, not in software engineering (which we're very familiar with). So, a bit of explaining is in order first.
Agile is not a “more efficient way of running a project”.
In fact, Scrum is specifically designed to increase both the effort and value of each project. But a few traits of ‘agile’ don’t make it easier.
In particular, Scrum requires that the team focus on breaking up large efforts into smaller ones. For some teams, this isn’t easy. Even if they can make the shift, their capacity for splitting work into smaller chunks might not be as high as other teams, who tend to have better abstractions and be more comfortable with communication and information flow.
Alternatively, projects might have some synergies.
Misconception #2: No or Limited C-Level Sponsorship
The challenges of becoming a learning organisation can only be handled effectively by self-organising teams. The collaboration will lead over time to a ‘team of teams’ structure. This approach requires at any stage the full backing of the C-level. Limited support will render efforts practically useless.
Equally futile by comparis on to the lack of C-level support is a bottom-up approach by hacking the existing culture. It usually leads to frustration, and talented people with an agile mindset will seek better-suited organizations elsewhere.
Fallacy #3: Everyone Loves ‘Agile’
“Everyone loves agile. It’s simple, it’s elegant. It’s an awesome way to do business.”
So say many project managers.
Except they don’t. They certainly don’t love it. In fact, many find it tedious and uncomfortable, and its unending sprints often slow down their “normal” business as they scramble to keep pace.
The biggest mistake an agile evangelist makes is to mistake adoption for love. If your company has mostly people who love agile, then you are on a good path. If you’re in a meeting where nobody has a clue what is being said, and nobody is doing what they’re supposed to, then you’re in trouble.
Agile adoption can be quick or it can be slow, but if your company isn’t doing well because of its adoption, you should be reconsidering it.
Fallacy #4: We Know what to Build
"I’ve tried to teach myself the entire software development stack, but I’m not up on how the major platforms and languages work. So I try to develop these by hand and test each on myself. You can’t spend a million dollars doing nothing, though. That’s what test-driven development (TDD) does."
Being un-scrum’ed, however, means you don’t have much incentive to do these kinds of tests. So you end up building less, testing more, and repeating.
Solution: Discover Your Larger Performance Problems
Scrum is focused on solving five to ten-minute problems. If you work on them all day long, you’ll get better at getting them done. And there’s no guarantee it will even make you better.
Because of this, you should first solve the biggest problem you have.
Fallacy #5: Scale Like Spotify
Spotify (SPOT) is one of the biggest music streaming providers in the world.
Its revenue has more than tripled in three years, to $2 billion.
If Spotify was a large, stable company, what would it look like? It might offer free, ad-supported service.
And it would need massive scale to reach an equally large audience.
But Spotify did something radical. It switched to a freemium model.
It charged users for only a limited number of songs. But by making the service completely free, the company was able to scale to more than 70 million subscribers.
Of course, there are advantages to a freemium model.
For one, Spotify does not have to worry about losing users to free competitors.
And there are also fewer service-level issues.
The truth is, you cannot just copy the “Spotify model” as there isn't one. Spotify was built with such an idea in mind from the beginning, yet they needed to find its way. This “way” is what every other organization needs to figure out on its own: How to become an agile organisation?
More to follow in our PM shares his experiences column... Stay tuned!
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