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.

ICAgile Certified Agile Coach Training

Last August 1 – 2, I attended an ICAgile accredited Agile Certified Coach Training class.  The training was facilitated by Elizabeth Thakkar from Agility4All.

The learnings from the training course equips the attendees with a good understanding of the roles and responsibilities of an Agile Coach.  The content of the course was really interesting and I liked how it covered the essential things one needs to learn to become a good Agile Coach.

Knowledge Gained

The learnings I got from the training helped me gain a better understanding of the answers to two big questions I had about being an Agile Coach:

• What is an Agile Coach?  What does an Agile Coach do?
• How does an Agile Coach fulfill his / her responsibilities?

Included in the course material is a great introduction to Agile Coaching.  I like how it was said that it was mostly about forming good relationships with the people you coach so that you are able to help them achieve their goals.  For an Agile Coach, as the name implies, it is all about helping people be successful in projects by applying Agile principles and values.

I learned how Agile Coaches can wear different hats depending on the situation.  The Agile Coach can be a teacher, a mentor, a facilitator.  And sometimes the coach digs in and shows people how to do the work.  I think the last one is generally avoided by coaches and often saved as a last resort in the effort of teaching something to the coachee.

During the training, we did exercises to practice some techniques and methods used by Agile Coaches.  I learned how to form coaching agreements between coach and coachee to set the correct expectations.  We practiced active listening and giving feedback.  We also discussed different kinds of conflicts and how to handle them.

The Experience

I felt very lucky to have taken the training with a group of very talented people who were very generous in sharing their insights and knowledge.  During the two days, the participants actively engaged in discussions and sharing about the course content.  It was good for me to hear stories of scenarios which happened in companies and organizations that have a different settings and environments than the companies I have worked for.  I really liked the sharing about the challenges which Agile Coaches encounter: getting support from leadership / management team, dealing with unreasonable expectations about being Agile, coaching difficult team members, making sure everyone has a good understanding of Agile principles and values.

Here are some comments I have about how the training was facilitated:

• I think time management could have gone better.  I felt we rushed through some parts of the course and activities.  We lost time mostly by going on tangent discussions during some of the sharing.  If discussions were more focused and contained, then I think we could have made a better use of the time in the training.
• While it was good that the trainer brought out a lot of sharing from the participants, I was expecting to hear more from the trainer; sharing anecdotes, analogies and insights about the various topics discussed during the training.  The training would have been better for me if I have learned more from the trainer, from experiences and anecdotes I could relate to.
• In my opinion, I could have gotten more learnings from the activities done during the training if the trainer gave more feedback.  The participants were able to share their thoughts about the activities but I felt we lacked feedback from the trainer.  I expected that the trainer would be a mentor in this part of the training and provide actionable feedback for the participants.

Moving Forward

I have learned a lot from the training and gained a better understanding about the role of an Agile Coach.  I would like to continue growing as an Agile Coach and I am very interested in completing the Agile Coaching Track of ICAgile.  The next step on that journey is to take an Agile Team Facilitation class.  It is my hope that having these certifications would open up for me opportunities which will allow me to gain more experience as an Agile Coach and expose me to different settings and environments.