Product thinking

Project to product mindset

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

The advent of Agile has helped teams increase delivery speed, quality, and overall productivity. When a team transitions from waterfall to agile, it’s common to still hang on to old ways of thinking. One of the last holdouts is typically keeping a “project” mindset, where everything must fit into a project structure. This fits in with the “big planning upfront” mentality, which is not Agile.

While there will always be larger initiatives, teams must transition to a “product” mindset. Testing every idea before implementation is part of the culture, and software or process isn’t just delivered and forgotten about. The value of the delivered software should be measured, and customer feedback should be actively sought, which then becomes feedback for new ideas.

This course will cover how to transition from the project (output focussed) to product thinking (outcome focussed). We will also introduce techniques for measuring customer value and how the software delivery process can be changed to support this new way of thinking.

What you will learn

The Product Values and Principles
The Product Lifecycle – Big Picture
Product Thinking versus Project Thinking
Lean Startup
Design Thinking
Mobius Loop & Mobius Navigator
Planning: Building the Team’s Backlogs/Roadmaps

Learning Objectives

The role of the Agile Product Manager and Product Owner through the full lifecycle
The key transformation leadership and facilitation skills necessary to transition from a tactical focus to a more strategically focused approach
How to apply Design Thinking and Lean Startup, including creative strategies used to plan a portfolio or product backlog using the Mobius Loop
How to bridge the gap between traditional and project management and product management

Outline

The New Product Values Mindset

This module introduces the core concepts of what Product Thinking is and why it’s beneficial.

Product Thinking versus Project Thinking
Outcome vs. Outputs
Workshop: Outcome vs. Outputs
The empirical process backbone
Project definition
Attributes of project-based organizations
Product definition
Attributes of product-based organizations

Design Thinking

-Design Thinking Overview
-Design Thinking Golden Rules
-Definition
-Ideate
-Evaluate
-Prototype
-Test

Lean Startup

-Overview
-Who is the customer?
-Pivot or persevere

The Mobius Loop: Discovery Cycle

Combining Lean-Start Up and Design Thinking into one repeatable framework
The Discovery Cycle:

-Design Thinking
-WHY: Focusing on Business Outcomes
-WHO: Discovering Empathy
-The power of Psychological Safety
-Building Target Outcome

The Mobius Loop: Options Cycle

<strong>Options Cycle: </strong>
-Lean Startup
-Hypothesis and Assumptions
-Refining Options
-Scoring (Prioritization)
-The MVP Experiment and Research
-Building OKRs
-System Thinking Impact analysis

The Mobius Loop: Delivery Cycle

The Delivery Cycle:
-Deliver (Next, Actions, Measure): The Agile, Scrum, Kanban connection
-MVP Experiment & Research revisited
-Pivot or Persevere
-Build OKRs

Bonus: The Mobius Loop and Scrum@Scale connection

OKR

-Objective
-Key Results
-KPIs & Metrics

The Activities

Each participant will be encouraged during this course to solve a real customer-facing problem (external or internal customer) or complete an innovation activity. We will methodically walk through each step of the Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Mobius Loop cycles.

The goal of this class is to be less theory and moire practical application.