The Main Thing: If Agile Isn't Working, you're Doing it Wrong!

The cycle of people criticising agile methodologies and then others jumping in to say "You're doing it wrong" is so predictable.

If only a handful of people were getting poor results you could say they were doing it wrong. But when it’s failing the majority of people, there has to be something wrong with the methodologies.

There is a fantastic image of "How to Draw an owl" that is a perfect analogy for agile frameworks. Step 1 - draw two circles. Step 2 - draw the rest of the owl. This is exactly how agile methodologies are presented. They give you a high-level overview of how a single team should operate but they ignore all of the complexity around the organisational structures, ways of working, funding, governance, alignment and many more.

People are too busy to try to figure out the intricacies of how to make these methodologies work in their context so the waterfall status quo wins out. There are some "scaling frameworks" available but they just revert to strict waterfall processes and heavy-handed management techniques.

We think there is another way.

Over the past 9 years of running UXDX, we've seen over 800 case studies of how the world's leading companies are scaling effectively. We've seen the common patterns that work and the challenges that companies have to overcome.

We distilled all of the insights into a single vision for how teams should work: zero blocking dependencies from idea to satisfied customers. Teams should be empowered to identify opportunities, design solutions and build the product. But a vision alone won’t help with the implementation challenges that we discussed above. That’s why we’ve documented the different structures, alignment, funding and governance processes needed to empower teams at scale.

We’re calling our new framework ZeroBlockers. See more about how it works below.

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

Agile Maturity Assessments: Going Back To Shu Ha Ri by Matthew Hodgson
How going back to basics can improve outcomes: Shu - Learn the basics. Ha - Add new patterns. Ri - Reflect and Improve.

Building Your Own Agile Team Maturity Assessment by Kasie Kremenak and Ben Linders
A guide on the key elements of a maturity assessment and how to build your own.

Product Direction

Building Effective Product Roadmaps by Ant Murphy
Ant dives deep into the different roadmap types, the tools to support them and the need for different roadmaps for different people.

6 Strategic Concepts That Set High-Performing Companies Apart by Kaihan Krippendorff
Research and analysis of today’s landscape identifies six key strategic concepts including partnerships, the value of being open and letting the competition go.

Continuous Discovery

Writing Next-Level Surveys: How to Get "Story Data" from Static Questions by Nikki Anderson
Surveys sometimes get a bad rap (and for good reason). Here are a few ways you can level up your survey game.

Why UX Maturity and Culture Matter to Your Research Career by Heena Khatri and Yumi Koyama
Your country and your company shape the growth of your career in UX. Low maturity might limit your learning whereas high maturity might limit opportunities.

Continuous Design

Navigating the Curse of Knowledge in UX by Dr Maria Panagiotidi
The difficulty of imagining what it is like to not know something you already know can hurt discovery. Maria shares some tips to overcome the curse.

The Untapped Potential Of System Thinking In Modern Design by Bushra Mahmood
Bushra gives a deep dive into design thinking and how you can use it to create solid design foundations.

Continuous Delivery

Modelling Events in Event Driven Applications by Barry O'Sullivan
The biggest challenge in event modelling is granularity: how big or small do you make your events? Barry shares some tips.

Agile Architecture, Lean Architecture, or Both? by Kurt Bittner, Thomas Betts and Pierre Pureur
Lean is about optimising known processes and agile is for discovering something for the first time.

Introducing ZeroBlockers

We’ve had 20 years of Scrum and agile and still 90% of product features fail to deliver the expected value. While it is easy to say we should focus on “outcomes over outputs” it is really hard to make the necessary internal changes.

Our goal is to make it easy for companies to firstly, understand why things are not working as they expect, and secondly, provide a detailed framework that they can implement to improve outcomes.

We have written extensive docs at https://docs.zeroblockers.com covering everything from how teams are structured to ensure autonomy, to how to align, fund and govern teams when they are empowered to decide what solutions to build.

The framework is the result of nine years of research incorporating over 800 case studies from talks at UXDX conferences. We’re really excited about the framework and think that it will be hugely valuable for companies looking to maintain the speed and effectiveness of small teams as they scale.

But we’d love to know your thoughts.What do you like, what do you dislike and what could we improve to make the framework even better for you.

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New Video Released This Week

Join Oriol Marimon-Clos, Chief Product Officer at Cooltra, as he explores the shift from traditional IT to agile product development. He'll discuss key strategies, challenges, and the benefits of embracing a culture of innovation and agile methodologies to enhance product workflows.👇👇

Job of the Week

Senior Frontend Engineer
🏬 UserTesting
📌 Barcelona, Spain

About UserTesting
UserTesting offers tools for experience research, helping businesses gather user feedback to improve products and services.

See role details here

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: How do you think an apprenticeship should work?

There are a lot of differing opinions about how to structure an apprenticeship.

As always, we received some great comments from people about their experiences with Higher National Diplomas (HNDs) in the UK and different options for the degree level that can be achieved using a mix and match of classroom and hands-on learning. I also agree with the comment that a college education is about more than just learning - I for one wouldn’t swap my uni years for anything.

Maybe we need different options that suit different people and companies, and as one person commented why not have “All of the above. ”.