Failure — Find all Articles on Failure

Faking Agile Metrics or Cooking the Agile Books

by Stefan Wolpers | 2019-10-07 Agile and ScrumAgile Transition

TL; DR: Faking Agile Metrics — An Eye-Opening Exercise

Imagine you’re a Scrum Master and the line manager of your team believes that the best sign for a successful agile transformation is a steady increase in the Scrum Team’s velocity. Moreover, if the team fails to deliver on that metric something is wrong with the Scrum Team. Alternatively, something is wrong with you as you are the Scrum Master and hence responsible for the team’s performance. (Apparently, not faking agile metrics, or being transparent in this case, does not seem to be valued here.)

Learn more about how to coach these kinds of line managers and help them overcome their preference for the industrial past with a simple exercise on how to cook the agile books.

Faking Agile Metrics or Cooking the Agile Books — Age-of-Product.com

Webinar #4: Agile Failure Patterns 2.0 [Video]

by Stefan Wolpers | 2018-07-23 Agile TransitionWebinars

TL;DR: Webinar Agile Failure Patterns 2.0

The fourth Hands-on Agile webinar agile failure patterns 2.0 addressed why ‘agile’ is not the quick fix for dysfunctional organizations.

Hands-on Agile Webinar Agile Failure Patterns 2.0 — May 22nd, 2018

Ebookmakr Failure: The Fallacy of Knowing What to Build – The Post Mortem

by Stefan Wolpers | 2015-10-29 Lean and Product

Executive Summary – Lessons Learned from Ebookmakr’s Failure:

Love the problem more than your solution.
Don’t push too far your dreams of China in your hand.
Use prototyping tools such as Marvel when running user interviews. (More here: Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority.)
Be careful with the selection process for user interviews: You might end up picking those that will support your vision – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy trap.
Beware of false positives in user interviews.
Never start writing a single line of code before an appropriate number of customers signed up. (For clarification: Customers are paying users.)
Never spend money on developing a prototype when you’re not working full-time on growing the user-base and increasing customer value.
Be patient and give your product the time it needs.
Always make branded t-shirts and wear them later regularly to preserve the recollection of the disaster. (See below.)