Learning Goals: Introduce Product Management skills, story splitting, and iterative product development in a simulation that we can all relate to–preparing a big holiday dinner. Holiday meals require lots of collaboration, planning, and problem solving. There can be many stakeholders, rigid timing, and high standards, so getting everything to the table at the right temperature can be quite a feat! Throw in a “magic oven”…
Art Gallery Retrospective
This is a retrospective technique I learned from Esther Derby and Jerry Weinberg. I’ve extended it a bit differently into the analysis and deciding what to do portions as they were using the technique as a debrief mechanism for an activity in the PSL course. This technique is particularly useful for multi-team/large groups. It will take about 120 minutes to run in full. One may…
Newspaper Retro
Background This is an idea I presented at the Retrospective Facilitator’s Gathering in May 2019. Newspaper articles tell stories based on facts. So this retrospective idea is to use this metaphor to capture data, analyze it, and decide on some actions. In some ways, it is similar to the team co-creating an A3 report. Each person is a reporter bringing the news back and then…
Satisfaction foot
Have you ever thought on how to quickly identify all problems related to a specific thing – project, iniciative, sprint? Or how to rank them and engage everyone, no matter whether you have group of 5 or 50 people? Sounds like a tough task, doesn’t it? I faced the exact same challenge, and in order to deal with it I designed Satisfaction foot game that helps a…
Conway’s Compositions
In 1967, Melvin Conway introduced the idea that states “organizations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” This has become known as Conway’s Law. While Conway was a programmer, his law rings true for about any product that a system of people develops. This game is intended to demonstrate the impact different organizational structures…