Category: Interview Series

Whether you are a startup or a large organisation, you face numerous problems to deliver value. Jake Knapp is renowned for his work as an author of the book ‘Sprint’ that turned out to be a guide for a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at more than a hundred companies. It is our privilege to share his thoughts on design sprints and its benefits.

Q1. You are known as the author of the New York Times bestseller Sprint and your contribution to products like Gmail, Hangouts and Microsoft Encarta. What is an alternate introduction to Jake Knapp? 

Jake: A very tall person with glasses.

Q2. According to you when we call a situation, a problem?

 Jake: When I say “problem” I’m usually talking about a challenge that a team is facing. So it’s a “problem” more in the sense of something to solve rather than, you know, something bad.

Q3. It generally happens that in order to achieve the short term goals, teams fail to live up to long-term vision of the organisation. How can this challenge be addressed?

Jake: In a design sprint, I always encourage teams to be very optimistic and idealistic as they set their long term goal, to keep it in mind throughout, and ultimately to measure success based on that long term goal. Tactics like this are important to make sure we don’t get too focused on the near term.

Q4. What is a Prototype Mindset? What are the key benefits of adapting to it for Startups?

Jake: The Prototype Mindset means you’re going to build something for the purpose of learning—not for the purpose of making it perfect, and you’re going to test it, and you’re going to be okay with it failing, and you’re going to be okay with throwing it away and starting over. Startups and really all kinds of companies and teams benefit from this approach because it gives you more shots at finding the right solution, and takes away that stress of getting it right.

Q5. Please share your three mantras to work faster, smarter and together.

Jake: Design your time, work alone together, prototype and repeat.

Q6. How design sprints can help the teams take a pause and ensure that everyone is going in the right direction?

Jake: The design sprint is sort of a theme park where we step away from regular work for a week. I find the highly-structured format allows teams to reset their thinking and be able to see their projects with fresh eyes—and sometimes that means confirming that they’re on the right track, and sometimes it means realizing they need to change course.

Q7. What makes a team, a right team?

Jake: Diversity of skills and expertise, and the decision-maker in the room.

This edition features Teodora Bozheva  is the Co-Founder, and Principal Trainer and Coach at Berriprocess. She has spoken in about organisational challenges to Business Agility.

Let’s read;

Q1. Organisations are in tremendous pressure to achieve business agility. How to cope up with the pressure to achieve business agility?

Teodora: The changing market, technologies and customer expectations are forcing the companies to develop skills that allow them to adapt quickly and deliver value faster than their competitors. 

Recent statistics (State of Agile, May-2019) show that 97% of the companies are adopting Agile methods. I am pretty sure that some companies are doing this because they see Agile as a fad. Others, however, realize that they need to grow their business agility, if they want to survive. 

I would like to talk about the companies who are really interested in improving their adaptability. My experience shows that there are three key factors that make this possible:

• Obtaining fast feedback from the field
• Ability to make decisions quickly even with incomplete information
• Leadership and courage to execute the decisions

Obtaining fast feedback from the field is important for getting the pulse of the context. All well focused visualization techniques, information radiators and feedback cadences help to obtain fast feedback

Decisions are made fast when there is a clear and shared purpose and company’s management is aligned around it. It is Management’s duty to unite the business parties that have to make  decisions for the good of the business.

Executing decisions, especially when the necessary information is incomplete requires courage and leadership to start small, collect needed feedback and use it to get further.

Developing business agility starts from the management of an enterprise, not from the teams. That is, the management has to be committed to foster these skills in the company, lead the initiative and help the rest of the people to understand and join it.

Q2. It is not enough to change technology, practices and services if people are not able to change their mindset. Share your opinion on the same. 

Teodora: Indeed, technologies are important. They facilitate the adoption of new practices of work and management, the generation of information necessary for analyzing the current situation and making decisions, as well as the delivery of valuable products and services in shorter times. However, if people do not understand the purpose behind the introduction of the new technology solutions, until they get motivated to take advantage of it for themselves and for the business, little effect will be observed. Therefore, I truly believe that all of us who are involved and are leading business agility development initiatives have to work very actively on creating the right motivation that would bring to progress, demonstrate benefits and generate higher motivation for improvement.

Q3. What are the technological challenges existing to achieve business agility.

Teodora: The most frequent challenge I face is selecting the right infrastructure (collection of tools) for managing work. It is curious that companies tend to select “free” tools or very limited ones to save costs without evaluating the extra costs and time their employees spend because of tools’ limitations. So, in their intent to reduce time to market, cost and increase efficiency often I see decisions that lead to larger delivery time, higher costs and lower efficiency precisely because of selecting an inappropriate tool.

Q4. According to you what is the impact of Digital Transformation upon the Agile community?

Teodora: Definitely the Digital Transformations hype grows the Agile community. This does not necessarily mean the community of people with the right mindset, not simply recipe implementers, but in general I see it as very positive. The cultural shift takes time.

Q5. How do you begin with planning for change?

Teodora: I always start with understanding the “why” and the “now” of the companies – what motivates them to introduce new practices and habits and what is their current situation. Since David J. Anderon and I developed the Kanban Maturity Model I use it a lot for creating this initial understanding of the organisations, and defining a roadmap with them and for them. At the same time this helps me validate the model and make it more concrete and easier for use for other people as well.

Q6. Is there any way to determine if the change we are pursuing is valuable or not?

Teodora: In my opinion there are two groups of indicators that show us, if we are producing the desired effects:

• The business outcomes: improvement in the organization’s capability to deliver products and services that meet and exceed customer expectations
• Internal organizational health indicators showing us, if the improvements are sustainable.

The Fit-for-purpose framework developed by David J. Anderson and Alexei Zheglov includes useful guidelines for driving and evaluating organizational and business decisions.