Don't Assume You're Creating Value - Prove It!

Does your organization find it hard to determine "the right thing" to build? You are not alone - Agile methods offer few guidelines on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog's content and priorities, so there is a significant risk that Agile teams end up building "the wrong thing right." Approaching product development as a series of hypotheses about customers' behaviors and value perceptions allows us to expand the scope of Agile's "inspect and adapt" feedback loops to systematically identify and validate critical assumptions about our product's value proposition. We also discuss ways to derive testable assumptions to enable validated learning, as well as implications on project planning and budgeting.

• Mathias Eifert

  1 Recording

  Mathias Eifert is a coach and advocate for agility at all levels of the organization and a Managing Consultant at Excella in the Washington DC metro area. He has more than fifteen years of experience using Lean and Agile approaches to improve clients’ processes and build better products. As a consultant to both public and private sector organizations, Mathias helps clients discover the power of shortened feedback loops to manage uncertainty, reduce risk, and maximize business value. He is particularly focused on coaching organizations to apply Agile and Lean principles to improve their own practices rather than relying solely on acquired processes. With a background in the Lean Quality movement, Mathias is passionate about expanding Agile’s focus on working software towards establishing value and quality as the main drivers for an optimized customer experience. He is active in the DC Agile community and is a frequent presenter at conferences and local user groups.

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