Last week I went to Agile Australia Sydney. As usual this is a very inspiring event that gives some perspective and where people can really talk and exchange on methodologies and agile subjects.

The notes I took from the day 2 are below.

Marty Cogan: Ordinary people, extraordinary results

The link to the presentation is here

Marty talked what you need to create great teams to make good products.

And these teams often are teams who can experiment and make prototypes. This idea came back in a lot of different presentations.

Teams that work in an agile way and deliver products that solve problems have these two common traits:

• release often: everyday or every week,
• empowered, the goal of these teams is to serve the customers in ways that meet the needs of the business. Which is quite different from serving the business.

Indeed, teams that release often will hve to put in an effort on quality to release in a more automated way, without releasing bugs which will force them to have a better code and understanding of what they do.

Marty also talked about that most managers don’t empower their teams because they don’t trust their employees or teams. What’s interesting here is that trust often depends on competence and character. Best teams are often composed by engineers and people who are on a mission to make something good because they believe in it on the contrary to people who would just wait for their pay check.

To have a team moving forward and being inspired product teams need leadership to reach greater accomplishments. What is the leadership doing in most cases?

• Product vision
• Product strategy
• Product principles
• Product priorities
• Evangelism

This does not mean agile teams don’t need management. On the contrary they need good managers. What are doing good managers?

• staffing: work closely with HR to find the right people to work with the team
• coaching and mentoring, listening and unlock the potential of the people working for them
• give reachable and relevant set of objectives. Basically, give your team problems to solve for them to express their capacities and find the right ways to address them.

This talk was really refreshing because it really shows that doing agile does not mean you don’t need management but good management. And that people need to work their craft in order to build proper working relationship and then create trust.

You can find below the sketchnotes of some presentations I attended to: Make Strategy happen and flow behave, Sherlock Holmes and value detection.

Make Strategy happen and flow behave

Sherlock Holmes and value detection

Thanks to OCTO Technology for giving me a day at this great event.