Passionate Product Leadership

Last July I attended Jeff Patton’s Passionate Product Leadership Workshop. It was a live online training course which ran for 4 days and each session was 4 hours long. Zoom and Mural were used for the workshop. It as an amazing, superb learning experience! Jeff is an excellent teacher. You can read more about him here: from this page.

I was presented with the opportunity to take this course and at first I was hesitant to take it. I was thinking how this will help me become a better Agile Coach. Fortunately, I have a great mentor, Daniel my boss, who reminded me of my aspiration to be an “enterprise level” coach. And so I took the course and I learned how to help my company be better in the area of Product Leadership. I engaged more with the Product Managers and shared what I have learned to everyone in the company: from Development Teams to our Marketing Team and to the Customer Success department as well

Key Takeaways from the Workshop

There are three important questions that everyone involved in product development should be asking at every step of the process:

• Is it valuable?
• Is it feasible?
• Is it usable?

Anytime you do not have a satisfactory answer to any of these questions, you should be thinking and discussing a change in your plans. Anytime your team spends significant time arguing about any of these questions, you should pause and rethink your strategy.

The answers to these questions come from different perspectives on the product. This leads to the next key takeaway, it is good to have a triad of leaders in product development. The triad consists of: a leader on the business side of product management, a technology leader, and a user experience leader. Actually it doesn’t have to be a trio of leaders, this could take form as a “core product team” consisting of people who collaborate to make decisions.

To make smart decisions, the Core Product Team needs all the valuable inputs it can use. Another key takeaway is, everyone contributes what they can to the product development process. Silos should be broken down and collaboration among people from different departments should be encouraged. Product Managers should not lock themselves in a room while they “design the product and write specifications”. Development teams should not just wait to be handed requirements before they contribute to the product.

More to come…

I have more learnings to share and I will do so in other posts. I am grateful to have attended Jeff Patton’s workshop and I am eagerly sharing and applying what I have learned. Without a doubt, the knowledge and wisdom I have gained is helping me become a better Agile Coach.

Scripture-based Agile Coaching: Staying Out Of Arguments

A few years into my professional career, I was a Software Developer back then, I was a hot-tempered fool who easily got into arguments. I was proud of my accomplishments and I felt that I always had the right thing to say. I felt that I always had something to contribute, something important to say.

Fortunately, through the years and through many humbling experiences, I have gained wisdom and self-control. Many Bible verses have helped me learn and relearn this lesson of having more restraint and not getting into pointless arguments. This verse is one I have read recently:

Any fool can start arguments; the honorable thing is to stay out of them.

Proverbs 20:3

One main reason I easily got into arguments, is because I was in a hurry to express my point of view. I hastily assume that I understand what I am hearing and quickly form my response. And most of the time I ended up having the wrong understanding and being a fool. To grow out of this behavior I have taken to heart one of the habits of effective people as defined by Steven Covey: “Seek first to understand, and then be understood.”

This change helped me grow to become a better Agile Coach. I can form healthy working relationships with my colleagues. These relationships are based on trust, respect, and honesty, and not on position nor power. I have found my influence growing, allowing me to do my best to help people do their best.

Random Agile Thought – The Ideal Team Player

This was shared by my boss, Daniel: according to Patrick Lencioni, the ideal team player has three characteristics:

• Humble (does not think less of self; think of self less)
• Hungry (aggressively pursues goals)
• Smart (emotionally smart, in interactions with others)

I like it! 😁 I have always looked up to people who has these three traits. I have always enjoyed working with them.

A growth mindset requires a humble attitude. You must be open to learning. You acknowledge that you do not know everything and you accept help from others. This does not mean you are not confident with your skills or knowledge; rather, you accept that in a team, you can do more by working with others.

Passion and drive are important motivators for successful individuals. They also bring this with them when they join teams and so this directly influences the success of teams.

It is important to be intelligent and skilled. It is equally important not to be a jerk if you are in a team. Respect, trust, openness, empathy, and kindness all propel a team forward to success. So yes, being emotionally smart is an important characteristic.

I hope this random agile thought helps you and your team be more Agile. 😊

Random Agile Thoughts – Completing a Goal

In one of the conversations we (me and my fellow Agile Coach) have with my boss, we were given this scenario:

The team was not able to complete a goal it has set. The team worked hard on the target, but in the end failed to meet the criteria required for goal completion.

And we were asked this question: “What will you say to the team?”

My answer is this:

I would say to the team that we have failed to complete the goal we have set for ourselves. We acknowledge the hard work we put into this effort and we appreciate the learnings we have gained. I would encourage the team to think about why we were not able to complete the goal. This reflection will help the team grow and become better.

I think the completion of the goal is more important than the effort put into completing the goal. When you set a goal, you set it because you are after the value you will gain from it. You don’t set a goal just to work on the goal. You don’t set a target just so you can try to hit it. You set a target because you want to hit it.

I am not discounting the effort and the learnings you gain from doing the work to meet a goal. This all very important. I am just saying that you do not lose sight of the bottomline – you have to complete the goal.

I hope this random thought helps you to be more Agile. 😊

Continuous Improvement with Iron Man

I love Iron Man in the MCU! His armors are awesome and his character development is superb. He started out as an egotistic and self-centered billionaire/playboy and became a hero who sacrificed his life to save the universe from Thanos. 🤩 As an Agile Coach, Tony Stark’s continuous improvement and evolution deeply resonates with me. You can see that with every new armor version, Iron Man becomes better, based on what he has learned and experienced. If that doesn’t scream kaizen, I don’t know what will!

The world may have seemed to stop during this Covid-19 pandemic with everyone staying at home and streets being empty, but continuous improvement and learning did not. And rightfully so. I think it became even more important, so we can evolve and adapt. In this post, I want to share key learnings I valued during this time of the pandemic.

Focus

Agile and Lean puts emphasis in the value of focusing on the most important thing to work on for the product. Stephen Covey defined the habit of putting first things first as one of the 7 habits of highly effective people. This is one of the values that helped me adjust to the effects of the pandemic. It was easy to feel overwhelmed, and countless of times I had to stop, take a deep breath, and focus. The guiding principle is to do the most important tasks first and accept that you will let go of other activities. You will not be able to do everything you want, but you ensure you are able to do what is important at any given time. When you feel you are veering away from your target, you stop, be still, and then refocus.

Part of being focused is knowing not to take on too many tasks, responsibilities, or activities. It is ok to say “no”, and there are a lot of good, respectful, and kind ways to say it. One key thing is you don’t want to be defensive about it, just be open and say what you have on your plate and what is important to you. Trust that people will understand, especially your family, friends, and even your bosses and colleagues at work. They know you and have trust in you too.

You Work with Humans

Even though Tony Stark comes off as being arrogant and narcissistic, I think he has great compassion for others. He takes care of his teammates, providing them with armor, tools, tech that helps protect them. He provided the team with the Avengers Tower and Avengers facility in Upstate New York. He mentored Spider-Man and deeply cared for him. He had good relationships with his employees – Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts.

One of the Agile values defined in the Agile Manifesto is: “People and interactions over processes and tools.” For me, one application of this value is having compassion for the people you work with. I greatly appreciate the support I got from my boss when I had to adjust my working schedule to help my kids with school-at-home. My peers appreciated the times I caught up with them to see how they were doing and how they were coping with the effects of the pandemic. They were happy to have someone show concern for them. As an Agile Coach, this is one of the services I offer to people I work with. As someone working with an Agile Coach, I think this is one thing you can expect from your coach.

God says in Ephesians 4:32: “Be kind and compassionate to one another…”. This Bible verse speaks to me more and more each day during this pandemic.

Attitude of Gratitude

Modern society doesn’t promote being content with what you have. It is easy to get lost in acquiring new things, getting more and more of what you want. You are blasted with ads of products claiming to be better than the products you currently have. Advancements in technology, always a double-edged sword, can easily make you want to get the latest, the best so far. With the restrictions, lockdowns, and quarantines, the things we thought we could not live without, became less important.

Expressing gratitude for the things I have and appreciating them more are actions that are helping me cope with the challenges of the pandemic. It takes my mind away from things I worry about and focuses it instead on things I should be thankful for. This attitude of gratitude brings much needed positivity. As an Agile Coach, I make it a point to celebrate success and wins with the team. Even a simple “thank you” to show appreciation can go a long way in promoting a positive attitude and strengthening of relationships.

Work in Harmony

When Iron Man first met Thor in the MCU, he learned that Thor’s lightning can power up his armor. In Endgame, we saw how Iron Man used this knowledge when he made the Nano Lightning Refocuser and asked Thor to hit him with lightning so that he can use the energy to blast Thanos. It’s always a treat to see in the movies how the Avengers come together as a team and combine their powers to be stronger.

This past year I have constantly reflected on how respect, trust, and patience are very important for collaboration. Respect your teammates and colleagues: their effort, contributions, insights, skills and experience. Trust them that they will do their best. Be patient when things don’t go as planned or your expectations are not met. The pandemic added numerous challenges and difficulties to the way we work together and in addition had great effects to our lives outside of work. Finding harmony with my colleagues was one critical thing that helped me this past year.

Part of the Journey is the End

I don’t see the end of this pandemic yet, but I do know that it will end and then there will be other challenges in our journey through life. It is my hope that I can learn and adapt like Iron Man. Even in the end, you can see how he prepared his Mark 85 armor to take on enough of the power of the Infinity Stones. That was not part of the plan, but he was ready, he designed his last armor in the MCU with that capability.

I hope these learnings may be of some help to you. Let’s make sure to open ourselves to even more learnings this 2021.

What the heck happened to Remote Agility in 2020?

So 2020 has come and gone, the year the Covid-19 pandemic started. And I did not write a single blog post, not even one! Guess I got some explaining to do. 😅

Well, after my last post in 2019 I was feeling a bit tired of writing. I was dragging my feet (or maybe my hands – for writing 😁) and I was just out of ideas. I planned to pick it up on the next year. 2020 had other plans though. It was a very challenging year. Everyone had to cope with a lot of changes. There were things and activities I had to drop, to focus on what I needed to do. So I did not find myself writing any posts on this blog for the year 2020. I lost sight of my purpose for writing on this blog, which is to share my learnings and insights as a way to contribute to the Agile community. And to help people like me striving to be Agile while doing remote work.

You lose some…

The last year brought significant changes to my lifestyle. My family bunkered down and mostly stayed at home. I can count, using just one hand, the number of times we (all of us, together) went out, and these were just to do drive-bys and drop-offs to houses of relatives and church. I get to go out more because I am the one getting the essentials we need: groceries, water, medicine, supplies from school, and the occasional take-out from restaurants 😄. All of this trips though was planned and executed so that it was fast, efficient (that it minimized the times I had to go out), and safe (done very carefully to lower the risk of exposure as much as possible). I had to be fast, I wasn’t comfortable with wearing face masks and face shields for a long time. This 2020, we have said goodbye (for now) to going to malls, taking trips to beaches and resorts, seeing family, relatives and friends, and enjoying nice meals at our favorite restaurants. It is sad, but we are still fortunate and blessed by God because we could have lost more. I did not lose my job. We did not lose our health. We still have the things we need daily.

Another big change for me is, I had to put in more time and effort in supporting my kids as they do school at home. It felt like I have gone back to school myself! 😅 You’d think that with just staying at home you’ll have more time on your hands, but it turned out for me, I had to do more than I have the time for.

You win some…

Letting go of some things in your life gives space to new things. Last year I increased my effort and time for studying the Bible and meditating on God’s Word. I also grabbed the opportunity to serve in our church, Saddleback. My wife and I volunteered to help in church activities that are done virtually. It was a wonderful chance to apply what I have learned in being Agile and working remotely to serving God and our church.

I have improved my skill in playing the piano! 🥳 We used the SimplyPiano app for self-learning. It was great how one subscription can be used by the whole family, so my kids also learned something new!

My wife gave me a round studio light for my birthday last year and this allowed me to level up my toy photography. 😁 I also borrowed her more powerful camera (more powerful then my phone camera) for better shots. The picture at the start of this post, the picture of Iron Man, that is one of my favorite shots.

That’s life!

If there is one thing that I take seriously in being Agile, it is the ability to adapt to changes. That’s life, change is inevitable. 2020 was a hard year. I think it would have been harder for me if I did not have the experience of working at home and being Agile. Last year, remote work strongly said…

And I was like…

Coming back to the blog

And now I am writing again on this blog. I have learned that “it’s ok not to be ok” (from a Netflix series 🤣). However, I do still want to share my insights and learnings and help anyone who would care to read my blog. So here I am, ready to pick it up again. I’m sorry for being absent. I am grateful for your time in reading what I have to share. I hope it helps you in anyway it can.

A Master of the Agile Arts

In the years that I have been working as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach, I have been blessed with superb mentors who I look up to.  I believe that having a mentor is key to continuous improvement and growth. My current mentor is Ken Furlong. He is the Director of Product in eComEngine and he is an experienced Lean and Agile Coach.

I would often sit-in on meetings where Ken would discuss Lean and Agile principles to new employees joining the company.  I learn a lot from observing how he presents and shares ideas and insights.  He is confident and comfortable in his delivery, there’s a certain finesse in how he answers questions showing his deep knowledge and practical wisdom of Agile principles and Lean practices. He speaks clearly, is concise and straight to the point.  I already have a collection of the analogies he uses to explain principles in a way that people can relate to, making it more easy for the audience to understand the principles.

I asked Ken some questions, centered on being Agile while working with remote teams,  and on this post I am sharing them along with Ken’s answers.

As an Agile Coach what is your “plan of attack” when you first start working with a remote team?

The plan is generally the same as when beginning work with a co-located team.  The coach needs to orient themselves to the team’s environment and spend most of their time observing dynamics and just getting to know the team members.  As with a co-located team, part of that process is paying special attention to how their environment (physical or virtual) impacts (for better or worse) the team’s communication and collaboration.  Just as physical space and physical distance can encourage or discourage communication and collaboration, so too can “virtual space” and “virtual distance” (think tooling and infrastructure).  The general principles a coach brings to bear on the situation are pretty much the same, what changes are the specific tactics and recommendations that can vary widely depending on the context.

What do you think are the top three traits of a successful remote Agile team?

It’s hard to force rank traits in general because each situation is different and the different contexts may require different traits on the part of the team.  That being said, it will be hard for any remote team to be successful without these three:

1. Individuals are self-motivated
2. The entire team is aligned on the team’s goal(s)
3. The team has high communication saturation and individuals are highly interactive with one another throughout the day

It’s not to say that those three are sufficient for the team to be successful but they are necessary, in my experience.

As an Agile leader what are the top 5 challenges you have faced when effecting change in a company composed of remote employees?

1. A lack of engaged team members (which is often bred by siloing, that itself is a result of the remote environment not being compensated for properly)
2. A dearth of feedback (verbal and non-verbal) to the coach (often exacerbated by a lack of good communication tools, but fundamentally based on the fact that you are not physically co-located)
3. A lack of data about the team members’ behavior day-to-day
4. An inability to simply observe without having to “set it up” over a phone or video conversation
5. An inability to respond to moment-to-moment successes, failures, surprises, learnings, etc.

Continuous Improvement

What do I mean by continuous improvement?

One of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto states: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

To be Agile is to be continuously improving. Our world is ever-changing and in order for us to cope with those changes we must seek to become better, to improve constantly.

I think continuous improvement is part of the habit of “sharpening the saw”, one of the 7 habits of highly effective people as explained by Stephen Covey. This is the habit of renewing yourself, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. By doing this you keep yourself ready to face new challenges as they come. Continuous improvement is a good mental exercise, it helps you learn more about what you already know and can also learn something new.

Why is continuous improvement important?

It is only natural for us, as living organisms in this word, to evolve. Continuous improvement is evolution. It is crucial to our survival. And it certainly applies to how we make a living, how we do our job and get money which we need to survive in our world right now. So basically continuous improvement is important because it helps us survive. If we don’t continuously improve, we can not adapt to the changes in our industry. If we can not adapt to changes, our jobs are at risk. If we lose our jobs we won’t have money for our needs.

What do I do to sharpen my saw?

Read articles and blog posts

I have developed the habit of reading at least one article or blog post every day. Doing this activity regularly helps me in a number of ways:

• I learn about latest trends on how to do my work or on how to be better in what I do
• I gain new insights to problems I am currently dealing with or have dealt with in the past. I can read about how other Agile practitioners solved the problems.
• I am able to collect references which I use when I teach about how to be Agile.
• My favorite authors become my mentors in a way. I can learn from them by reading their blogs. And sometimes I get to have discussions with them when I post comments on their blogs or articles.

I would recommend subscribing to your favorite blogs so you can easily get notifications when new content has been published. My favorite are blogs from Mike Cohn.

Read books

I usually read a book if I want to immerse myself in learning about a particular subject.  Recently I have finished reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Agile Coaching. I’ve read this one cover-to-cover. Sometimes I would just read selected chapters of a book, just to focus on the subtopics relevant to what I am currently doing. Usually when I read a book, I try to apply what I have learned immediately so that I can better understand what I have learned and retain the knowledge.

Watch online training videos

I love how online training videos are more accessible these days. It is a nice alternative to just reading about a topic.  You just have to make sure you are attentive to the video. Some online training sites have quizzes which will make you more engaged while some have projects you can do, so you can apply what you have learned from the videos.

My favorite online training sites are:

• Front Row Agile
• Pluralsight
• Udacity

Attend meetups and conferences

Recently I have been attending the monthly meetups of the Agile PH community and it is great to hear about the insights and experiences of other Agile practitioners. Plus it is fun to go out and meet new people and break your daily routine at work once in a while.

I consider it a great privilege and opportunity to be able to attend conferences. There is a ton of knowledge and wisdom you can gain from listening and participating on the sessions to having side discussions with attendees. You get to share “war stories” and learn how somebody else from another part of the world is dealing with the same problems you encounter.

To make the most out of attending meetups and conferences you must make sure you participate in the discussions. Listen to what others are sharing. Talk with people. Engage in conversations.

Discuss with peers

You’re lucky when you have a group of people you can discuss with about what’s going on with your work. These individuals have the same role as you or at least have experience shouldering the same responsibilities that you have. Sharing stories and insights is a great way to learn. It is important to get a new perspective on challenges you face at work, it allows you to become better and more creative at handling upcoming obstacles.

Learn from a mentor

When you want to continuously learn and improve, that means you are always a student who needs a teacher –  a master to surpass, a mentor to follow. If you are able to find a mentor who really cares about your growth and is generous in sharing with you all the wisdom he or she has gained, then you should do your best to take care of that relationship and learn all you can. Having a mentor is critical because you need someone to guide you.  Somebody who has walked the path to get to where you want to be. A mentor is also someone you look up to, someone who you want to be. All of this gives you the drive and focus to be better, to improve.