December 21, 2022
By Stripe One
A client we had an ongoing relationship with came to use with a request to help them develop a product that needed to be in market in time for their annual conference a few months away. Their budget was restricted (as was the time) so we agreed on a 2-week discovery period followed by x3 2-week development sprints.
We had to form as a team quickly, condense our learning phase and ensure there was minimal waste and maximum value in what was delivered during our development sprints. Here are some of the things I learned …
The team focused on Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and features that sat outside of this were moved to ‘release 2’ on the backlog. For example there was a requirement that each individual clinic needed to be able to select and display their own logo on their website. In sprint 1 we developed a User Story that allowed them to link to an image asset via an existing URL, but didn’t deliver a method to upload a logo file directly until the end of the final sprint when we had additional capacity for ‘should’ work items.
As this was an additional (but more robust) solution to achieve the same result for the customer so, it was classified as ‘Should’ not ‘Must’ using MoSCoW prioritisation.
As with any product development well crafted User Stories were the backbone of success on this project. These were refined in conjunction with the development team and the client Product Owner ahead of the sprints during dedicated backlog refinement sessions, even though we were short on time we didn’t skip this vital part of the process. At the point of accepting the User Stories into the sprint were well understood and met the Definition of Ready.
Sprints were well planned and balanced to capacity across the project. We took in slightly less than 30% of the work during the first sprint, about 40% during the 2nd sprint and the remaining in the 3rd sprint which gave us a little room for the inevitable tasks that came up.
While the development team understood the requirements and value of the user stories, how they achieved that was largely at their discretion. Therefore, they took ownership of the product and owned the quality of the code and the end-user experience. (I can’t really emphasise enough how this alone factored into the success of the project)
The client was actively involved in every sprint ceremony which hugely aided communication, ensuring blockers were quickly resolved.
The client was able to prioritize deliverables and proactively change the priority as new information came to light.
Features with unknown effort were ‘spiked’ so we could be more confident of the outcome when sizing them (e.g. Create QR code per clinic).
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