PM408BKK
Agile Product Development
Faculty
Lisa Cooney
Agile Coach at Edward Jones
Course length
Duration
Total hours
Credits
Language
Course type
Fee for single course
Fee for degree students
Skills you’ll learn
Overview
Building great tech requires more than great product knowledge and management - it requires a deep understanding of Agile ways of working. “Being agile” is so much more than dev team practices, it is being mentally flexible and highly adaptable to constant change. In this class, students will learn how to navigate the jargon and use agile concepts to achieve terrific results with teams and organizations. In addition to learning about the frameworks scrum and kanban, we will review the philosophical principles behind why these frameworks can be useful, how to modify or recombine them, and how to be sensitive to the human psychology that makes it all work. Through a combination of lectures, small-group work, learning games, workshops, and projects (both structured and self-directed), students will learn to avoid the pitfalls and leverage Agile for their product and business success.
Learning highlights
- Describe an “Agile Mindset” and how it is relevant to product management.
- Define psychological safety, describe the conditions necessary for it, list some key indicators of its presence or absence, and explain why it is essential.
- Describe hybrid agile frameworks, models, and philosophies (such as SAFe, scrumban, etc.) and when each might be useful.
- Describe how a Kanban board and a product backlog function together to manage workflow.
- Describe the conditions under which team autonomy makes sense and when autonomy needs to be balanced with strong leadership.
- Give concrete examples of some cognitive biases and self-limiting beliefsr and explain how to deal with them
- Explain Systems Thinking.
Course outline
15 classes
AGILE
- Agile Mindset - What it is, competing definitions of it, what it is not, what it enables and why it matters.
- Backlog - What it is and how to create one (we will co-create a backlog of Agile topics to cover in this class using the tool Trello).
- Dot-voting - how to prioritize collaboratively with a group.
- Definition of Done - What this is and why you need it before you start.
SCRUM
- Scrum - What it is, how it works, and why everyone says they “follow scrum.”
- Scrum Team - What it is, how to adapt it, and how to form them (we will form our own pseudo-scrum teams using a team self-selection exercise later in the week).
KANBAN
- Kanban Board - What it is and why it helps?
- Kanban methodology - what it is, how it works?
- Flow – Metrics that support success with Kanban.
- Scrumban - a flexible blend of Scrum and Kanban that takes a cafeteria approach of using what works for a particular context.
TEAMS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
- Psychological Safety - what it is, how to know when you have it, what it feels like, and why it is important?
- Team Self-Selection – How to run a team self-selection exercise and why this makes such a big difference to product success.
RETROSPECTIVES AND AGILE ROLES
- Agile Roles – what they are now, what they are evolving to be, and why words matter.
- Retrospectives - what they are, and how to run one (we will run one on Week 1).
THE BRAIN
- Developmental Feedback - What it is and when you need to use it. How to give it. How to turn feedback you receive into developmental feedback.
- Cognitive Bias - What it is, what you can do about it, and why it is important to understand it.
- Limiting Beliefs - What they are and how to recognize and deal with them.
Power - How to be aware of power dynamics and bring agility to improve your own personal power to achieve great outcomes for yourself and others.
DEVOPS
- Delivering incremental value - Agile is about quickly creating and sharing valuable things with others.
- DevOps – Gene Kim’s 3 ways (Systems Thinking, Experimentation, Feedback Loops), DevOps Agile Skills Association (DASA) maturity model.
- Systems Thinking - Personal Mastery, Causal Loop Diagrams, Mental Models, creating and sustaining a learning organisation, shared vision.
- Running experiments and fast feedback loops - Being open to learning, viewing mistakes at learning opportunities vs failures, getting feedback from users directly and making adjustments for the next iteration.
FACILITATION
- Facilitation - Why having a “neutral” facilitator makes a difference, how to be a decent facilitator, and when to call in a pro.
- Meetings - Meeting etiquette and good hygiene.
- Liberating Structures - Leveraging this approach to open-ended, connected conversations and decision-making.
DATA
- Data - Relationship between quality of data and quality of analysis.
- Types of Data - Business data vs. production data for testing; role of internal corporate data in large companies; qualitative vs. quantitative data.
- AI - recent trends in using AI to enhance agility on teams and in organizations.
LEAN
- Relationship between Lean and Agile - What is Lean; How agile “uses” lean concepts; When to focus on one vs the other.
- Value Stream Mapping - What it is, how to do it, why it helps.
METRICS AND DEPENDENCIES
- Metrics and Measurement - How to choose what to measure; when metrics are useful and when they might be harmful; dashboards, visibility, and consistency.
- Estimation and Prediction - Time frames and time boxes; Story Point pros and cons; Roadmapping vs. Estimation.
- Dependency Management - Identifying dependencies; Removing or adjusting for dependencies.
TOOLS AND REMOTE WORK
- Tools, tools, tools - What are the main types, when to use which one, pros and cons of some of them, how to know when a tool is controlling you (or your teams); benefits and drawbacks of switching tools.
- Working from anywhere - Remote work; Hybrid models; Value of being in-person vs Value of working where you want to; How to make any arrangement work out OK.
MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP
- Agile Management - Offering support vs micro-managing; Vital role of good management supporting self-organized, autonomous teams; manager as coach; agile project management.
- Agile Leadership - “Sense and Respond”; Letting go of controlling behavior; Bringing out the best in the people around you.
- Self-Organization, Autonomy, and Leadership - Definitions of each, how they are interrelated, and how all are necessary but must be in balance.
- Transparency vs Responsibility - What do these words mean in a work context?
RISK AND TRANSFORMATION
- Related Helpful Paradigms - Positive Intelligence; The Four Agreements; The Core Protocols.
- Risk - How Agile manages risk; risk assessments; project management risk matrix.
- Agile “Transformation” - What this means in theory, what it is like in practice, and why it matters?
- Newer trends in Agile - Business Agility; Open Space; Clean Language.
FINAL EXAM
- FINAL EXAM
Course materials
Books
Media
Methodology
The pedagogy for this class is drawn from the concepts of agile - MVP, iteration, frequent reprioritization, adaptation to change, self-organization, feedback loops. We’ll have a healthy balance between structure and exploration, guidance and freedom, principles and experimentation, curiosity and necessity.
While there are several core concepts we must cover, students will be able to explore what they are most curious about and choose topics to learn in depth. The sequence is less important than student engagement - several topics are unrelated, and thus, we can tackle them in the order that meets the needs of the students in the class.
The format for this class will include many teaching modalities: lectures, learning games, small-group and large-group discussions, workshops, activities, student presentations, homework (research and reading), and group projects.
Each day following the first class will begin with a formal check-in and mini retrospective on how the class is going. Then, I will be transparent about adjusting based on student feedback. As the class progresses, the retros will gradually open up to include how the students are with one another, their emotions and impact on each other, both as humans and in terms of learning outcomes. Sometimes I will step in and share what I think they need to learn next, but most of the time I will let the students follow their curiosity and passions to explore topics collaboratively together.
For sessions 7-14, I will cover the essential topics, but they may not be in the same order as given in the syllabus.
Grading
Lisa Cooney is a co-author of Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile (2021) and editor of Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out (2019). As a prominent member of the international Agile community, Lisa has spoken at many conferences and meetups on topics such as Agile 2, Agile and Devops, Cognitive Bias, Power, and Developmental Feedback.
Lisa has served as an Agile coach in a wide variety of organizations including Edward Jones, Spotify, the Agile 2 Academy, Axios, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), and the Department of Homeland Security. She is certified in Agile coaching, culture assessment, facilitation, scrum, and SAFe (SA). Lisa has a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Wellesley College and a Masters Degree in Instructional Technology from the University of Virginia.
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Agile Product Development
by Lisa Cooney
Total hours
45 Hours
Dates
Jan 29 - Feb 16, 2024
Fee for single course
€1500
Fee for degree students
€750
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Will I receive a certificate after completion?
Yes. Upon completion of the course, you will receive a certificate signed by the director of the program your course belonged to.
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