Surviving the Transition to Agile Development
- 1. YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY A Product Manager’s Guide to Surviving the Transition to Agile Development Silicon Valley Product Management Association July 2nd - 2008 Rasmus Mencke
- 4. History
- 5. 8 Age of Salesforce in years
- 7. 3 Number of people in R&D
- 8. smart fast innovative
- 9. 4 Number of Major Releases per year
- 10. 7 years later
- 11. rapid success
- 13. 1,000,000+ Subscribers
- 14. 150 Million transactions per day
- 15. 200+ people in R&D
- 16. it was getting more difficult to deliver
- 17. Days between Major Releases Features Delivered per Team 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
- 18. 1 Number of Major Releases in 2006
- 19. Yep, that’s it. (just one release all year)
- 20. Why?
- 21. Lack of visibility at all stages in the release Late feedback on features at the end of our release cycle Fixed feature sets
- 22. Long and unpredictable release schedules
- 23. Gradual productivity declined as the team grew
- 24. What did we do about it?
- 25. Major enterprise-wide Agile Transformation to ADM in just 3 months + another 18 months of continuous improvement
- 26. “ I knew we needed radical change to get us back on track to ” regular releases and agile delivered.! Parker Harris Founder and Executive Vice President, Technology Salesforce.com
- 27. Transformation Results Features Delivered per Team Days between Major Releases 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
- 28. Agile Transformation Timeline “Agile Launch” Big Bang Rollout 144 146 148 150 152 154 October January April July October January April Rollout Adoption Excellence Expansion
- 29. Customers
- 30. Our customers are happy…
- 31. “ ADM has delivered total visibility, total transparency and unbelievable productivity… a complete win!! ” Steve Fisher Sr. Vice President, Platform Division Salesforce.com
- 32. 154 152 On time 150 delivery? 148 146 Last waterfall release 144
- 33. No really. Every agile release has been deployed on-time (down to the exact minute)
- 34. “ Since implementing our iterative development methodology which enables us to deliver more frequent releases, we have seen statistically significant improvements in our satisfactions scores across our service attributes from our features to our platform. ! ” Wendy Close Salesforce Customer Satisfaction Survey Sr. Manager Product Marketing Salesforce.com (Source: Salesforce.com Relationship survey, conducted by independent third party CustomerSat Inc., July 07 and Feb. 08. Sample size equals 4000+ randomly selected worldwide respondents from all size companies and industry sectors.)
- 35. 94 % % of customers that indicate they definitely or probably will recommend salesforce.com to others * Source: Salesforce.com Relationship survey
- 36. +61 % improvement in “mean time to release” for major releases in 2007
- 37. +94 % Increase in feature requests delivered - 2007 v. 2006
- 38. +38 % Increase in feature requests delivered per developer - 2007 v. 2006
- 39. +568%
- 40. Our teams are happier…
- 41. “ Simple is better. With our agile approach to product development we've put our amazing people in charge. They work as a team to do the right thing for the customers, their fellow employees and our shareholders.! ” Todd McKinnon Sr. Vice President, Research & Development Salesforce.com
- 42. 92 % of respondents believe ADM is an effective approach for their scrum teams
- 43. 91 % of respondents believe the quality of our products have improved or stayed the same * 59% say our quality has improved
- 44. 86 % of respondents are having the “best time” or a “good time” at Salesforce * Improved from 40% 15 months ago
- 45. 92 % of respondents would recommend ADM to their colleagues inside or outside Salesforce
- 47. How’d we do it?
- 48. Launched organizational change program
- 49. Created a dedicated, cross- functional rollout team
- 50. Everyone jumped in together
- 51. Positioned as a return to our core values
- 52. KISS Listen to your Iterate customers
- 53. Distributed Ken Schwaber’s Agile book Developed 2-hour Agile overview – now a two day course
- 54. Sent 35 Product Managers to Product Owner Certification Sent 30 ScrumMasters to ScrumMaster Certification
- 55. Created weekly Product Owner and Scrum master forums
- 56. Created internal, wiki-based website as a reference for team members
- 57. Just get started. (the rest will come later)
- 58. Change isn’t easy. (get ready to be hated)
- 59. “Scrum doesn't account for the fact of the reality of the waterfall. You cannot deny this by superimposing scrum over it.” “Management is not proactive as we wait for decisions from management. Scrum gives me the feeling that Big Brother is watching and monitoring everything we do…” “It seems like we spend more time talking about scrum…than we spend time talking and working on salesforce.com.” “In many ways, scrum seems like an inflexible, bureaucratic process akin to something at the Department of Motor Vehicles.” “…ditch the stupid annoyingly dumb excel spreadsheet.”
- 60. They don’t like us. (and may never like us again)
- 61. Team is effective but productivity is lower “Stop trying to implement scrum, and look at how many releases we can really do in a year.” Lack of innovation. No innovation. I can't innovate. I am at the mercy of my product owner, who cares not for innovation, only the chirpings of customers... “We've managed to take a lightweight process and attach enough … to it to make it just as bad as our previous process, good job!” “Scrum does not meaningfully affect the team's effectiveness; it is structure and process that often distracts the team from their goal, and can be used to micromanage the team.” “The lingo is ridiculous”
- 62. But, they got over it.
- 63. And. Finally. The rollout is over! (but we’re not done)
- 64. Now for the later stuff.
- 65. Continuous Improvement “Agile Launch” Big Bang Rollout 144 146 148 150 152 154 October January April July October January April Rollout Adoption Excellence Expansion
- 66. Continuous Improvement PTOn System Testing Cross Team Impact Virtual Architecture “Agile Launch” Sustainable Velocity Big Bang Rollout Release Planning Release Management Dependencies Office Hours Open Space SoS Scrumforce October January April July October January April Rollout Adoption Excellence Expansion
- 67. Don’t be like us. (or what would we’d do differently)
- 68. A Product Manager’s guide to Agile
- 70. Traditional requirements Customer meetings Feedback from sales Surveys Support cases Online forums Usability Testing Focus Groups Site visits
- 71. Empower your customers Ideas
- 72. Product Backlog
- 73. Write business relevant user stories
- 75. Keep grooming the backlog
- 76. Measure Success
- 77. Key metrics
- 78. How do you measure
- 79. What have we learned
- 80. Train Product Owners early and with intensity
- 81. Bring in outside coaches
- 82. Focus on user story writing
- 83. Gather upfront requirements before starting sprints
- 84. Engage executives by giving them tasks
- 85. Survey
- 86. Survey your organization and learn how to improve
- 88. Advice
- 89. Create dedicated cross-functional Agile rollout team
- 90. Don’t be afraid of making big changes
- 91. Get outside coaches involved early
- 92. Encourage “radical visibility” over-communicate
- 93. Be patient and expect to make mistakes
- 94. Focus on user story writing
- 95. Don’t be afraid to change the entire company all at one time
- 97. Focus on principles over mechanics
- 98. Focus on getting several teams to excellence
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- 103. When the heat is on stick to your guns