Over the past 30 years, Pivotal and Pivotal/Tanzu Labs have developed an invaluable collection of lean, user-centered, agile practices and workshops. We’re thrilled to share them with you.
Using the “sailboat” retrospective format, start from the goal to find ways on how to get there. Teams place themselves in the future by imagining that their goal has been reached. By exploring their imaginary past, teams agree how to work together to reach the goal.
Prioritize options against 2 potentially contrasting criteria to identify the most important options to focus on now.
A way to identify how to improve teamwork by reflecting on what worked well, what could be improved, and what is on people’s minds.
Create a list of assumptions and identify which are the riskiest
Identify relationships between services in a complex system to reveal the notional target system architecture and record them using SNAP
Provide valuable design feedback to a project team so they can determine if further effort is needed
Understand the problem from different team perspectives and generate many solution sketches using scenario as a guide
An icebreaker that shows a room that even very easy tasks can be exceedingly complex to execute without full alignment
Drive out the domains, bounded contexts and services of a system to reveal vertical slices, trouble spots and starting points for rearchitecting the system
Identify and prioritize key product, business, project, and/or consulting engagement goals and anti-goals (non-goals)
A systematic way to set a baseline for a relevant key business metric
Prioritize any insights that were uncovered during research so the team can use them to make informed product decisions
A regular meeting for the core team to understand and align on the work to be done.
An optional planning session to make the Iteration Planning Meeting (IPM) more productive if needed.
Using customer narratives and data, “map” what they are doing, thinking, feeling and interacting with over a set period of time.
A variant on the classic Team Health Check, the Leadership Health Check focuses on topics that concern leadership teams in software organizations.
A workshop that clarifies and organizes roles and accountabilities of a group of people working together, so that you can reduce duplicate effort, identify gaps that aren’t being met, and be more efficient as a team. This method is most commonly used for leadership teams, rather than a balanced product team.
Summarize “at-a-glance” how users, business and technology meet to create a business opportunity.
A way to have your team create experiments to run so that you can validate or invalidate risky assumptions that may lead to product failure
Quickly generate many possible solutions after identifying who the user is and what problem they have
A communication and planning tool that shows sequential outcomes that help execute your strategy and build towards your vision.
A workshop to understand and map out all of the steps needed to get from a feature being built to having it running in production. This method adapts Event Storming to get people actively involved and contributing to the session.
Help the team understand how the primary persona interacts with all other personas
Help your team learn how to work better together (and have fun!)
A short reflection exercise between Core team members. Commonly accomplished at the end of a pairing day.
An exercise to learn from any incident that impacts the product or users. In the SRE community, this exercise is called an incident retrospective.
An exercise to help the team anticipate potential major reasons for project failure. The premortem can be seen as “a powerful protection against wishful thinking”
Prioritize problems that were discovered during research so the team can focus on the most important ones
Quantify the value a product delivers to users and the business to support your stakeholder’s assessment of their investment in the product
Create a provisional representation of a user based on existing knowledge and assumptions
Help sort through generative or evaluative research data using an affinity diagram
Surface risks and how the team might mitigate them
Help the team understand the circumstances surrounding the problem they’re attempting to solve
Uncover the hidden truths of a service visible to customers to improve consistency, profitability and impact.
Extract solutions that could potentially address the identified problem(s)
Determine which solutions to explore first
Speedback is a session where the “speed-dating” format is applied for exchanging feedback within a group of people, usually a team. It is intentional, timeboxed feedback gathering.
Stack Ranking (forced ranking) is a prioritization technique which involves taking a list of options (ideas, problems, stories, etc.) and ordering them along an axis according to a single criterion (e.g. value, importance, cost, complexity, risk, etc.)
Map out business, product, and project stakeholders that may impact or interact with the core team
Plan release cycles by organizing user stories into a step-by-step segmented flow
A set of lightweight techniques using agile and Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles that help teams plan enough to start modernizing software systems
Allow a team to determine, openly discuss and share their team values
Setting and agreeing on expected standards and behaviors defined by a team as best practices to work together smoothly and ensure the success of the task/project at hand.
Establish a common set of terms understood by the core team
A way to accomplish validating if your design is intuitive, so that you can identify key problems in the existing design, discover opportunities to improve, and learn more about the target user(s) behavior.
Level-set on user research best practices
Break epics and features into small, iteratively deliverable units of value to create a user-centered, agile backlog.
Visualize the steps an organization takes to create & deliver value to customers in order to help eliminate “waste.” A common use case is a path to production and product development life cycle.