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• Agile evangelism as a collaborative effort among team members |
• Importance of flexibility and adaptability in Agile teams |
• Role of the product leader vs. individual team members in driving methodologies and practices |
• Need for Agile awareness and knowledge across all team disciplines |
• Agile interview stage or methodology assessment in hiring process |
• Open communication and trust among team members |
• Importance of understanding "why" behind tasks and roadmaps in agile development |
• Roadmap creation process should involve collaboration between business and development teams |
• Development teams should be involved in creating roadmaps from the beginning |
• Roadmaps should not be imposed by business on development teams, but rather created together |
• Goal maps vs roadmaps: goal maps prioritize achieving incremental values over specific metrics. |
• Importance of direction and milestones: having a clear direction (Northern Star) and regular check-ins/milestones ensures progress towards goals. |
• Agile approach: being flexible and adaptable in achieving goals, taking shortcuts if necessary. |
• Unpopular opinion on food: using fresh ingredients is unnecessary if you plan to heavily season dishes. |
• Accountability and cognitive load: developers may not want the extra responsibility of creating roadmaps or planning. |
• Test equivalent of roadmaps and sprint planning: writing tests to ensure expected behavior is a possible alternative. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Good time of the day, everyone, wherever you join us from. Today Angelica and myself are going to be talking about a topic that is very close to Angelica's heart, and I am very excited to finally learn and kind of clarify everything that has to do with Agile. We are being joined by Inbal Cohen,... |
**Inbal Cohen:** Hello. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** How are you doing? |
**Inbal Cohen:** Very well. Thank you very much for having me today. I'm excited. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** It's our pleasure. We're excited to have you. Inbal, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? |
**Inbal Cohen:** So hello, I'm Inbal. I've been working in the field of product management for the past about ten years. I've had all sorts of different types of positions, mostly in startup companies in mobility, and fintech, and gaming. I've been CPO, CTO, director of product, and at the moment, I work at a company c... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** That's great. Thank you for a very thorough intro. It's cool to see how many parts of the industry you have touched, both different industries, but also different roles. Definitely cool. And let's start with a point. What is agile? |
**Inbal Cohen:** What is agile? |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** What is the agile methodology? |
**Angelica Hill:** And is it a methodology? |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** What is the methodology? |
**Inbal Cohen:** And is it a methodology? \[laughter\] Maybe just to start - it's not a cult, it's not a religion, and although it seems that anyone that is working in Agile, or has anything to do with it would be talking about it as they've discovered the truth of the world - which, honestly, I do the same thing; I sw... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Okay, so agile methodology is a list of steps to make incremental progress. |
**Inbal Cohen:** \[05:40\] It's more like a mindset that helps you understand what are the steps that you will need to take in order to get your job done well. So here's an example... One of the things that came a bit before agile was the whole concept of lean. So there's this company - you've probably already heard th... |
Let's say it's a project I have a very large project to accomplish; there is a piece of software that I want to develop. What do I need to do? I have 14 people. How do I arrange these people in a kind of way that they would make the most out of their time and their efforts? |
And another thing to take into consideration - agile isn't just about what to do. It's also how to nurture the people that are part of that team; how to create motivation, how to make sure that people are working in their highest capacity, and also working together in a very, very close way. That's one of the things th... |
**Angelica Hill:** And then how does agile relate to the practice of like Scrum, and the kind of day-to-day practices that I'm sure many of us are familiar with - retro, standup, sprint planning, grooming, etc. How do those two play together? |
**Inbal Cohen:** I love that. So Scrum - and you've probably also heard about Kanban; there's Scrumban, there's Safe, there is Less, there's all sorts of different types of frameworks that we could take to our advantage. And I think that frameworks are absolutely cool. They're awesome. There is a person that sat down a... |
There's all sorts of things that happen in Scrum that you would also see in other frameworks, like Kanban, for example. Still, we're breaking down larger tasks into smaller tasks; we're organizing, we're prioritizing them. We're taking them through swim lanes of development. But each and every methodology, or each and ... |
**Angelica Hill:** Okay. And then, I think - well, this is a personal preference... I feel like you can't talk about agile without talking about waterfall. I feel like whenever I'm talking about process, or whenever I'm talking to my team about agile practices, it's always like, "Oh, but this is waterfall. What is the ... |
**Inbal Cohen:** \[10:03\] I love that. And I think that waterfall is extremely important for understanding agile. One of the examples that I like giving about waterfall is - so I worked in automotive; I learned about it a little bit, and that's why my example comes from automotive. So let's think about a factory that'... |
When we're trying to produce a car, what we have to go through is a process of maybe two or three years of planning, trying out all sorts of different options. And then you take about two or three years sourcing all the materials that you need in order to produce - the steel, and the rubber, and the tires, and whatever... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So it's a waterfall because it's like stage by stage... |
**Inbal Cohen:** Exactly. It's step by step. Every time you finish a step, you're done. The process isn't planned to go back to the drawing board. You're already ahead. The train has already moved out of the station. And in agile, we're saying it's not step by step. It's like a type of loop-de-loop. And why is it alway... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So agile is this feedback loop. Waterfall, we say that's step by step, not going back. How about Scrum? |
**Inbal Cohen:** So that's agile. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So Scrum is part of agile. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Scrum is a framework of agile. And you can have different ones. You have Scrum, you have Kanban, you have Scrumban... You have all sorts of different frameworks that are doing those at scale. There's Nexus, there's all sorts of different types of frameworks to do iterative work. And it really d... |
\[14:08\] The amount of complexity might be different, the different types of languages that are being used are different, there might be the differences of the sizes of the teams... So according to all of these different parameters, a person that is in product, probably leadership in product, would need to decide on t... |
**Angelica Hill:** So is it like pick your own adventure? I feel going in you have all these frameworks, all these many different ways of doing things, and it really is kind of pick and choose as and when relevant. It may well be the same team has one project they do very strict agile, but then the next is waterfall...... |
**Inbal Cohen:** Absolutely. And doing it differently -- in my personal opinion, doing it differently would actually be missing out. If you're just trying to copy whatever a guidebook is giving you... You know, you just bought a book, or you went through one training, and you're like, "This is it. This is the only way ... |
So being able to open yourself up and know more about all the different frameworks, and being able to do that, as you're saying, go on your own adventure - that's part of the fun, isn't it? Like, getting to know your team, getting to know what works for you, trying different things out... Super-important. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Okay, so as a developer, I'll ask you, what tips do you have for me to make the most of agile? |
**Inbal Cohen:** That's fantastic. First of all, I would say educate yourself. One of the things that a lot of times we do is that we depend on other people within our team to be the experts in whatever their subject matter expertise is... Which is fantastic. That's their job; they should be the expert. But having some... |
The second thing is to really have in mind, agile isn't about output. It's not only about what you're delivering. It's about the process that happens in between. It's about creating high-performance teams. And let's say the aim, the goal of the person that is managing the team in an agile way - which is most probably, ... |
\[17:56\] And I'm going to quote someone that, again, I hope I'm not too much of a cliché, but Martin Kagan wrote a book, it's called Inspired; it's pretty much -- can I say that it's the Bible of PMs? Like, not to have any religious affinities, but it's a book that PMs very much look to, to get obviously inspired. And... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So as a developer, you say if I only kind of execute, what some people might refer to as a code monkey, you're only basically using half of the resources of this team of developers. And then you should be able to chime in and provide the feedback. And what stage would that make sense? So it can... |
**Inbal Cohen:** Well, it really depends on your style. As a product, I think it also really depends on the level of confidence the product manager or owner has in themselves and in the team. I would strongly recommend, just put aside ego, put aside any mistrust, anything that happened in the past, in your career, or w... |
And then specifically for your question, take these opportunities to understand that it's not just chiming in. You are part of the thought process. I would expect, as a product manager -- for myself, I have a rule. I mention anything that I want to have developed four times before it gets developed. One time - and now ... |
\[21:58\] And then a third time would probably already be in a grooming or a refining session. I already have my ticket; this is me sitting down with the team, already opening it up, breaking it down into smaller pieces... And then maybe a fourth time, if we have an extra estimation meeting, if we have an extra meeting... |
So by the time you as a developer, when you saw that ticket, you're like, "I already know what this is about. I know who to approach. I know who was interested in it. I know which people were involved in the conversations. I know how important this is. I know that my PM did her homework. I'm in, I'm involved." So right... |
**Angelica Hill:** So would it be a fair assumption to say that one of the tangential benefits of working in agile style as opposed to others, like waterfall, is that there is more space for input? And as you say, we keep on saying "Iterative approach. Iteration." Is kind of a side note benefit that developers have mor... |
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