PRACTICES
Practices & Workshops
A collection of lean, user-centered, agile practices developed to help teams align, discover, and deliver.
"Sailboat" Futurespective
Using the "sailboat" retrospective format, start from the goal to find ways on how to get there. Teams place themselves in the future by imagining that their goal has been reached. By exploring their imaginary past, teams agree how to work together to reach the goal.
2x2 Prioritization
Prioritize options against 2 potentially contrasting criteria to identify the most important options to focus on now.
3 Column Retrospective
A way to identify how to improve teamwork by reflecting on what worked well, what could be improved, and what is on people’s minds.
Assumptions
Create a list of assumptions and identify which are the riskiest
Boris
Identify relationships between services in a complex system to reveal the notional target system architecture and record them using SNAP
Design Critique
Provide valuable design feedback to a project team so they can determine if further effort is needed
Design Studio
Understand the problem from different team perspectives and generate many solution sketches using scenario as a guide
Draw Toast
An icebreaker that shows a room that even very easy tasks can be exceedingly complex to execute without full alignment
Event Storming
Drive out the domains, bounded contexts and services of a system to reveal vertical slices, trouble spots and starting points for rearchitecting the system
Goals & Anti-Goals
Identify and prioritize key product, business, project, and/or consulting engagement goals and anti-goals (non-goals)
Impact Analysis
A systematic way to set a baseline for a relevant key business metric
Insight Prioritization
Prioritize any insights that were uncovered during research so the team can use them to make informed product decisions
Iteration Planning Meetings (IPM)
A regular meeting for the core team to understand and align on the work to be done.
Iteration Pre-Planning
An optional planning session to make the Iteration Planning Meeting (IPM) more productive if needed.
Journey Map
Using customer narratives and data, “map” what they are doing, thinking, feeling and interacting with over a set period of time.
Leadership Health Check
A variant on the classic Team Health Check, the Leadership Health Check focuses on topics that concern leadership teams in software organizations.
Leadership Roles & Accountabilities
A workshop that clarifies and organizes roles and accountabilities of a group of people working together, so that you can reduce duplicate effort, identify gaps that aren’t being met, and be more efficient as a team. This method is most commonly used for leadership teams, rather than a balanced product team.
Lean Business Canvas
Summarize “at-a-glance” how users, business and technology meet to create a business opportunity.
Lean Experiments
A way to have your team create experiments to run so that you can validate or invalidate risky assumptions that may lead to product failure
Molecule Map
Quickly generate many possible solutions after identifying who the user is and what problem they have
Outcome-Oriented Roadmap
A communication and planning tool that shows sequential outcomes that help execute your strategy and build towards your vision.
Path to Production Mapping
A workshop to understand and map out all of the steps needed to get from a feature being built to having it running in production. This method adapts Event Storming to get people actively involved and contributing to the session.
Persona Ecosystem Map
Help the team understand how the primary persona interacts with all other personas
Personal User Manual
Help your team learn how to work better together (and have fun!)
Plus / Delta Feedback
A short reflection exercise between Core team members. Commonly accomplished at the end of a pairing day.
Postmortem
An exercise to learn from any incident that impacts the product or users. In the SRE community, this exercise is called an incident retrospective.
Premortem
An exercise to help the team anticipate potential major reasons for project failure. The premortem can be seen as "a powerful protection against wishful thinking"
Problem Prioritization
Prioritize problems that were discovered during research so the team can focus on the most important ones
Product Valuation
Quantify the value a product delivers to users and the business to support your stakeholder’s assessment of their investment in the product
Proto-Personas
Create a provisional representation of a user based on existing knowledge and assumptions
Remote Team Building
Activities and games to build team connection and engagement, especially when working remotely.
Research Synthesis
Help sort through generative or evaluative research data using an affinity diagram
Risks & Mitigations
Surface risks and how the team might mitigate them
Scenario Writing
Help the team understand the circumstances surrounding the problem they’re attempting to solve
Service Blueprint
Uncover the hidden truths of a service visible to customers to improve consistency, profitability and impact.
Solution Brainstorming
Extract solutions that could potentially address the identified problem(s)
Solution Grooming
A tool to understand and organize solutions so they can be prioritized effectively.
Solution Prioritization
Determine which solutions to explore first
Speedback Feedback
Speedback is a session where the “speed-dating” format is applied for exchanging feedback within a group of people, usually a team. It is intentional, timeboxed feedback gathering.
Stack Ranking (Forced Ranking)
Stack Ranking (forced ranking) is a prioritization technique which involves taking a list of options (ideas, problems, stories, etc.) and ordering them along an axis according to a single criterion (e.g. value, importance, cost, complexity, risk, etc.)
Stakeholder Map
Map out business, product, and project stakeholders that may impact or interact with the core team
Story Mapping
Plan release cycles by organizing user stories into a step-by-step segmented flow
Swift Method
A set of lightweight techniques using agile and Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles that help teams plan enough to start modernizing software systems
Team Values
Allow a team to determine, openly discuss and share their team values
Team Working Agreements
Setting and agreeing on expected standards and behaviors defined by a team as best practices to work together smoothly and ensure the success of the task/project at hand.
Ubiquitous Language
Establish a common set of terms understood by the core team
Usability Testing
A way to accomplish validating if your design is intuitive, so that you can identify key problems in the existing design, discover opportunities to improve, and learn more about the target user(s) behavior.
User Research Introduction Session
Level-set on user research best practices
User Story Writing
Break epics and features into small, iteratively deliverable units of value to create a user-centered, agile backlog.
Value Stream Map
Visualize the steps an organization takes to create & deliver value to customers in order to help eliminate "waste." A common use case is a path to production and product development life cycle.