Inaugural 3x Meetup: Exploring the Elusive Axes

London's first 'official' 3x meet-up during Kent Beck's last week in London (for a while). Join us for a workshop session.

Topic: Exploring the Elusive Axes
What is 'Success'? What is 'Payoff'? Why are these the x & y axes respectively? Challenge these labels with real-world examples of what matters to you, your users and your business in this workshop with Kent Beck.

Workshop format

6:30pm - Arrive, meet & greet.

7pm - Kent will give a short intro to 3x and it's two axes:

• x-axis: Success

• y-axis: Payoff

Then, in groups teams will share and discuss their own examples of Success and Payoff and playback their stories to explore the relationship between the two.

9pm (approx) close, although we can run a bit later if we need to.

Food and Drinks

Huge thanks to Unruly for sponsoring not just the space but also an assortment of Indian street-food and drinks!

About 3x: Explore, Expand, Extract

Product development proceeds in three phases:

Explore – the risky search for a viable return on a viable investment through experimentation. If you’re lucky, one of your many experiments turns out to be unexpectedly successful, which leads to:

Expand – now things are going nuts (think Pokemon Go or Facebook Live Video). Now, all you have time for is to eliminate the next bottleneck just before it derails you. Once growth becomes routine, it’s time to:

Extract – now the shape of the problem and solution spaces are clear. One euro in equals three euros out. Playbooks emerge, economies of scale matter: delivering the service at lower cost is more profitable.
(From The Product Development Triathlon (https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/the-product-development-triathlon/1215075478525314/), by Kent Beck)

While that is 3x in a nutshell, it has many more layers that can challenge how we perceive models of software and product development.

About Kent Beck: Kent Beck is a programmer at Facebook, where he coaches, researches software engineering, and works on infrastructure projects. He is also the founder and director of Three Rivers Institute (TRI). His contributions to software development include patterns for software, the rediscovery of test-first programming, xUnit, and Extreme Programming. He authored multiple books, including TDD by Example and Extreme Programming Explained.