Barry O’Reilly exhorts today’s leaders to “break the cycle of behaviors that were effective in the past but are no longer relevant in the current business climate, and now limit or may even stand in the way of your success.” After more than two decades of writing, refining, grooming, estimating and documenting user stories, it’s time to unlearn them.
In a vast and sad irony, user stories have become the heavyweight documentation and process that they were meant to replace. This session proposes that we strip away the accrued behaviors and get back to the heart of agile and focus on delivering — and measuring progress by — working software. We’ll cover some fresh ways to apply some of the manifesto principles, including:
- enabling constraints and explicit freedoms
- clear product vision and goals
- trust and psychological safety
- low level of work in progress
- tight feedback loops
Learning Outcomes
- Learn more effective ways of collaborating
- Learn how to create a team of product missionaries instead of mercenaries
- Learn how to identify problems and goals and invite teammates to solve them
- Unlearn behaviors that inhibit agility
