Agile Network India - Coimbatore Title: Agile - Making Product Development Better by Sarada Jayaraman Date: March 2023 Hosted by: Thoughtworks

1. “Agile – Making Product
Development Better”
Sarada Jayaraman
Lead Agilist – Cognizant Technology Solutions.
March 2023

2. Failure of Ideation Workflow Management
Scaling the Product
Teams
Change Management
Issues
Unclear Product Roadmap
Ensuring Product Quality
Challenges – Transformation & Product Development
Customer Satisfaction
Time to Market

3. How Agile- Key Techniques
• More customer satisfaction
• Early user feedback, frequent solution
validation
• Better product quality and improved
adaptability
• Determine the top priorities for the product
• Risks mitigated & early to market
• More Flexible & Productive teams
• Defining Roadmap/Vision
• Whiteboard sessions for
Planning/Requirement Gathering –Impact
Mapping
• Cross Skilled Teams & more effective
testing.
• Daily Huddles & Effective Collaboration
• Decentralized Decision making
Why Agile- Outcome
Case Study – Product Development Transformation on Flights & Logistics

4. Our Transformation Story
Renewed
focus on
customer
Interaction
Reduction
of process
and plan
Self
organized
teams
Cross
Functional
teams
Embracing
creativity
&
Innovation
Removing
layers of
managem
ent
Increased
Collaborati
on
Culture Change
Waterfall Agile

5. Need of the hour – Promoting Sustainability through Agility
FOSTER INNOVATION
● “We want to build innovative
products that delight customers”
● “We want to sustain and scale
our innovation through latest
technology & processes”
● “Inhibit slow adoption of idea to
production”
AGILITY DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
● “New features aren’t reaching
our customers quickly enough...”
● “We want to acquire the agility
to deliver business value more
rapidly and accurately”
● “We have frequent, and long,
production outages &
downtimes…”
CELEBRATE CULTURE
● “We want to shift the view of our
function teams, who see IT as being
project-centric rather than product-
centric.”
● “ We want agile teams aligned to
product capability “
● We want to create an effective team
structure that can handle change at an
impressive rate
Activate faster value
delivery while becoming
flexible and proactive to
market opportunity
Break silos, create team
engagement and attract the
best talent.
Create Product
Management Capabilities
aligned to business values
and customer needs

6. Team Structuring
Customer Journey Team Product Team Platform Team X-Ops Team
Delivers on Strategies connected
to specific products & operate
the product for long term high
quality & speed.
Platform Teams delivers
functionality in the platform to
support needs from the
Customer Journey - & Product
Teams.
DevXOps
Design Ops
People Ops
and more.
Delivers on Strategies
connected to the customer
journey, such as Increasing
NPS, ease of doing business &
Customization
Before During After
Self
Service
Support Teams acts to deliver self
service for all other teams or
pending automation until automated
self service. Could also coach,
train, mentor and support in
alignment and strategic input.
Self
Service
Assisted
Service
Self
Service
Teams that are Part of the
Product
Teams that are Leveraged
by the Product

7. Whiteboard Session for Planning Increment 1
Preparation Steps
Discover Real Goals
Define Good Measurements
Plan your First
Milestone
Mapping Steps
Draw the Map Skeleton
Find Alternatives
Identify Key Priorities
Earn or Learn

8. Agility
Why ?
SMART
Goals
What ?
Deliver
ables
How ?
Impac
ts
Who ?
Specific
User/Pers
ona
• Incremental
Delivery
• Parallel Testing
• More
Automation
The upgraded
Flight &
Reservation
System MVP
• Product Build
• Customer Build 1
• Customer Build 2
• American
Airline
• Delta Airline
Impact Mapping- Outcome
4

9. Change Journey: Achieving Agile Mindset for Product Development
Product Manager
PM will need to adopt Agile
methods and support her
team in sustaining a
Product-centric mindset.
Intrigued by Agile concepts,
but doesn’t know where to
begin
From:
• Limited responsibility for
project outcomes
• Long-term deadlines
• Finds it difficult to invest in
short term projects
To:
• Ownership for the
product
• Collaborative and Iterative
work increases work
quality and value
• Adaptive prioritization
ensures maximization of
resources and value
• Continuous learning &
innovation to drive value
Mindset Shift
Success
Measure
Dojo Program Increment 1 Program Increment 2 Program Increment 3 Program Increment 4
Initiation
Intensive hands-on training in
scaled Agile and Product-centric
principles
Engage stakeholders to roll out
strategy, manage expectations,
identify Change Champions
Demonstrate and apply
Product-centric ways of
working
Drive culture of continuous
learning, empower teams to
share knowledge
Recognize and commend early
adopters, advocates and
mentors
Reinforce principles and
celebrate success for sustained
change
• Conduct Agile Training and
ongoing evaluations
• Group in Pods for active
demonstrations, active
coaching
• Conduct Agile vision
workshop
• Drive participation,
encourage open discussion,
analysis and feedback
• Communicate Coach support
strategy
• Leverage Agile toolkit
resources as needed
• Reinforce application of
desired behaviors
• Inform OCM Plan / Coach
strategy as needed
• Provide ongoing Coaching and
learning opportunities
• Encourage continued peer
mentorship
• Drive open discussion in
internal Community of
Practice engagement
platforms
• Conduct Agile audits to
analyze adoption
• Recognize and reward early
adopters that demonstrate
consistency and growth
• Track feedback & report
business metrics
• Distribute Surveys to gather
feedback
• Capture lessons learned
• Reward Change Champion
contributions and
commitment
• Visible Sponsorship from
Leadership / Management
• Communicate vision and value of
product-centric approach
• Share long-term strategy, goals of
Dojo, on-going support approach
and self-service access to
resources
• Recruit for Change Champion
Network
• # of attendees scoring above
80%
• Training Satisfaction scores
• # of Pilot projects with Agile
• Time taken to deliver pilot
product releases
• # of projects following 90-100%
Agile principles
• User Satisfaction on training
and support
• # of Agile certification
completion
• # of success stories captured
• Validation & Finalized list of
behaviors
• # of Change Champions
identified and onboarded
• OCM Strategy & Plan
• Training Strategy and Plan
• Townhalls, team meetings
• Change Champion Strategy
• Agile Adoption (Dojo) Toolkit
(Resources, FAQs, Templates
etc.)
ONBOARDING
Townhalls, team
meetings
Change Champions
Network meetings
Agile Training
materials, resources
and Toolkit
Active Coaching
Agile community
engagement platform
Agile Certification &
Badges
User Satisfaction
Survey
Agile Adoption Metrics
Dashboard
Agile Success stories
Agile Champion
Rewards
Tenets
Approach
OCM
Accelerators
Success
Measure
Agile adoption Lessons
Learned
Agile Mindset
Adoption
ENGAGEMENT APPLICATION INVESTMENT COMMITMENT
ALIGNMENT
User Satisfaction Survey Drive continuous
learning
Ongoing Agile Self
Study / Learning
Day in a Life
Spotlights

10. Challenges
• People movement always makes it difficult
to provide sufficient KT/HOTO time to new
team members during the onboarding
window
• There are always some people
dependencies around some important,
critical or legacy technology related work
as some team members have a higher level
of knowledge and experience compared to
the other members
• If it’s a big team(8+ people) and working
on multiple areas/modules/technologies
needing a variety of domain and technical
skillset, then it becomes difficult for
everyone to know/understand everything
that the team works on.
• Insufficient collaboration, communication and
transparency within the team with respect to the work
done by the team members and their skills and
experiences
• Team disagreements/divergence
• People dependencies, working in silos and not enough
backups in case of a personal emergency
Impact
How to increase cross skilling within an Agile Team
Solution
Knowledge Sharing via learning
path.
Knowledge Challenge- badges
with score boards.

11. Measuring what matters: Product Impact and Autonomy as Key Metrics
f
✓ Productivity
○ # of Features / Microservices
✓ Predictability
○ Say/Do Ratio
○ Throughput Variability
✓ Responsiveness
○ Change Lead Time / Mean Time to
Change
✓ Output
○ # of Defects rejected/reopened
○ Escaped defects / Defect spillover
✓ Coverage
○ % of Test Coverage
✓ Stability
○ Time to restore service
✓ Product
○ Completed PBI Accepted Ratio
○ # of PBIs Created & Completed
✓ Business
○ % straight through processing
○ % users onboarded
○ Ratio of assisted vs. self service
○ Customer Satisfaction
✓ Mastery
○ Core Members Ratio
○ # of Support Requests
✓ Trust
○ Visibility / Meeting Participation
○ Scope Change Ratio
✓ Proactivity
○ # of Process Improvements
○ Technical Debt
Productivity
● Sprint Burndown
● Team velocity
● Health status
Output
● Bug count for current Sprint
● Production issue count based on
previous release
Plan Build Operate model
f
We will transition from measuring Velocity &
Quality to Velocity, Quality, Product Impact,
and Autonomy
Modern IT model

12. Team Agility
• Agreeing & work towards common team goals
• Knowledge share is an initiative now across the
team.
• One team mindset.
• Tools are the key & no manual status updates.
• Ceremonies are key for teams' success.
• Raising even early as potential risks.
• More conversations are on coffee breaks & on
desk.
• Scrum team.
• Individuals grow, helping freshers grow,
• Its my/our responsibility.
• Cross Skilled team.
• Working in silos – individual tasks over teams'
goals
• Knowledge sharing was never done. Keeping
with oneself.
• I do my job attitude
• No or less Tools updates on daily progress.
• Unavailable on all ceremonies.
• Bringing up risks late in the cycle.
• Reliant on more Formal Communication rather
informal chats.
• Dev/QA collaboration.
• Adaptability to train new joiners.
• Not Committed.
• No learning Culture
Initial State Current State
Learning
Curves

13. Q & A

14. Thank you !!