Are We Building the Wrong Thing Righter?

Ryan Shriver of Dominion Digital shines the light on Agile and Lean product development frameworks that drive better customer value outcomes.

Over the past decade, Agile and Lean methods have brought enormous benefits to teams and organizations. These improvements have primarily focused on helping them build things faster, with higher quality and improved collaboration. What hasn’t been a focus is ensuring teams are building the right things. As a result, a feature farming culture has emerged that focuses all their energy on managing backlogs and measuring velocity with little clue as to whether the improvements are achieving their intended business goals or solving a core problem.

This needs to change. Lean and Agile teams must start aligning their work to higher-level goals and iteratively delivering not just new features but real, measurable value. They need simple frameworks that help them build the right thing and make it hard to build the wrong thing. They also must evolve from done meaning does it run with quality to done meaning does it work effectively.

This session focuses on key principles and practices for helping teams define the right outcomes for any product or project and directly align align their options. Using visual and interactive techniques, Ryan will demonstrate how to implement these practices on your next product or project. He’ll also introduce Target Outcomes, a new framework that helps teams ensure they continually build the right things and validate their learning along the way. These ideas appeal to entrepreneurs, business leaders, product owners, analysts, technical and quality assurance leads – anyone interested in building less and achieving more.

Ryan Shriver is a Managing Consultant with Dominion Digital, an award-winning process and technology-consulting firm. Based in RVA, he helps teams and organizations of all sizes build the right things using Lean and Agile methods. He’s also the co-creater of Target Outcomes, a simple framework that helps people build less and achieve more. When not consulting with software teams, Ryan writes and speaks on agile development, DevOps and cloud computing topics for the The Virtualization Practice and GigaOM Pro.