PITA 015

TOPIC 1: Are Wardley Maps practical?

• Genuinely useful with C-suite, but hard to get it going - it took 5 people 3 days solid to create the first map, facilitated by a consultant

  1. You need to put the work in to really understand it to explain & facilitate it

  2. My team spent a ½ day on it and didn’t really get the hang of it

  3. Never heard of it, but did similar things with Business Process (BPM) tools

  4. Other value chain mapping tools are available - but Wardley Maps add the evolution axis to help with ‘war gaming’ for strategy

  5. For commodity management, Wardley Map actually shows the value of PRINCE 2 / Exploring the map - wardleymaps (Search for Figure 22. No one size fits all)

TOPIC 2: How to replicate the serendipity of a “walk-by team board” in a distributed setting?

• Show and tells are quite broadcast-y; so we do Drop-Ins.  Gather up recent decs/whatever, set aside 90 minutes, invite anyone to come by and chat.  Tried different formats - breakout rooms, live stream, etc.

• Async Design Sprints using MIRO and MURAL combined with a standing Google Hangout; plus - you can see other people interacting in real time. YAK and WHATSAPP give you quick voice messages as well

• Standing/permanent virtual rooms to just jump into

• More unstructured 1:1 catch-ups - or doing it via DONUT

• Deliberate communication structures are needed - Slack announcements, town halls, etc

• MIRO brainstorming sessions, with follow-ups a few weeks later.  Don’t discard the old maps.

• A shoutout to MS Teams

• we also did a daily product stand up for just 15 min and invited anyone in the company to join

• Connect.club looks interesting for a potential networking type-events. Haven’t tried it yet though

• BUT none of these replace ambient awareness

TOPIC 3: Helping your team transition to asynchronous working - tips?

• Notifications and To-Do lists.  How strict can you be about blocking anything non-urgent, creating separate channels or apps for different types of communication

• Apps that show XXX IS TYPING are bad for this

• Moving towards a culture of longer-form written comms that are actually read

• Tag messages as ASYNC (at the beginning) if you’re not after an immediate answer, sets a better understanding/culture

• Phrasing is important: ‘THINK about it’ rather than asking a question

• Melissa Perri thread: https://twitter.com/lissijean/status/1283022933431144448?s=20

• Bungay Briefing/Back Briefing

• Asynchronous Communication: What It Is & Why You Should Care About It (DOIST)

• Make sure people do the pre-reads to reduce the chance that the outcome of a meeting is another meeting

TOPIC 4: Product team structure - PO, PM who cares? Or do we?

• PO often means a JIRA/backlog monkey - but terminology is in the eye/ear of the beholder, and there’s nothing strict here

• Melissa Perri - Product Manager vs. Product Owner

• Marty Cagan - Product Manager vs. Product Owner Revisited

• Does the terminology matter? (we seem to think so)

• When the role is split between strategic and dev team management: there’s a real issue in imperfect communicaton