This past Friday I attended the 2014 AgileIndy conference. What the heck is a social media manager doing at this event? Good question. Recently the Association I work for formed a product tactical team that is slowly adopting agile practices. This cross departmental team is designed to capture the needs of each respective team and collaborate to develop and improve tools that will benefit our external stakeholders (member companies) and internal stakeholders (staff – primarily those who facilitate any implementation or customer service).
Throughout the conference I was surrounded by many brilliant minds, but even cooler was that every person seemed kind and eager to answer my questions and further my understanding of effective agile practices.
Indy Agile has monthly meetups that see anywhere from 40-60 people; however, this was only their second conference. Over 200 attendees packed the venue; which we shared with the some kind of Boxer club – bonus given my affinity to the breed.
Keynote speaker David Hussman presented “Lessons in Gravity.” He recommended several reading materials including Paul Graham essays, Founders at Work, and Escape Velocity. Honestly, Hussman is wicked smart and he moved so fast that I’m sure I missed a lot. Key points I did note were:
- When people try to take what works well within a small group and spread, or scale, it usually fails because it drives complexity instead of learning. He noted the gravity are these roles of process and procedures, architecture and so on. His example was the company SAP, and how they had 26 teams working in silos and not creating a cohesive product.
- Mass has consequence. At some point, you hit a point of diminishing returns. He asked us to think about our process mass, and challenged us to measure success on evidence, not adherence. He has a little fun with this and introduced NonBan – the least amount of process with the most real and measurable value.
- Epistemic arrogance is what you know vs. what you think you know. Product arrogance is the difference between what people need and what you think they need. Think in terms of “requirements.” There is a need for better discussion, not better documents.
- He touched on meeting mass and explained TDM – test-driven meetings. He said a client he worked with would send a note after every meeting on much money it cost. Steve Jobs is often referenced for his walking meeting, but Jobs would also ask each person why they where in a meeting. Do you know the mass of your meeting? Honestly, I hate to think about this.
- Gravity sucks. Hussman said we need to remember gravity is a theory. The more we get lost in gravity of certainty, the less likely we are to explore. Think about the gravity on your planet; in other words, the gravity of the roles and titles in your organization. When you say “we need more testers,” you’re really saying we have a lot of testing we need to do. He showed a great graph weighing Product Learning against Role Based Gravity. He compared it to a band; you usually have a guitar, bass, and drummer. They specialize in their instrument, but exist because they play well together.
- Gravity of scale – too many people working on one thing. He talked about cross cutting concerns. If everyone does the same process, we’ll be more successful is NOT the case. Take a look at constraints and dependencies to uncover things like teams causing the bottleneck.
- More velocity, really? What is your velocity. Hussman suggested reading Antifragile and touched on making things simpler, but not necessary simplistic- subtractionist thinking.
- Missions are essential. Why are you going where you’re going? He posed us to work through these questions: Who are you talking with? Where will you take them? What uncertainty do you want to explore? How wrong is your mission? How will you validate and learn?
And to think, that probably wasn’t the half of his stuff, just what I was able to scribble!
kpfled: 