Profit-Driven Agile: Getting Real About “Value”

Should Agilists care about profitability?
We use Agile to improve value delivery, and that means bottom-line impact, right?
But let’s double-click on that phrase “improve value delivery”. It turns out the “value” part is just assumed: If Agile methods help teams deliver faster / better / cheaper (or sooner / safer / happier), is that sufficient to prove we’re delivering more value?

The waves of layoffs over the past year indicate… maybe not.
Meanwhile, if we can’t demonstrate how the team directly impacts the balance sheet, how can we as agile coaches and Scrum Masters demonstrate our value in the face of budget cuts and layoffs?

• Do you struggle to demonstrate how Agile is making your company or client healthier financially?
• Are you trapped in a feature factory environment where everything is a priority and it’s unclear where the value is?
• Is your team excluded from product strategy discussions and decisions and you’re just there to execute?

These are all signs that “value” in your organization is being assumed, unclarified, and unverified, putting you, your team, and the entire organization at financial risk.

In this talk, Andrew Long will show you how to fix that problem. Let’s bring the right people together to characterize value in concrete terms, and collaborate to achieve valuable outcomes instead of just hustling to deliver more features!

In this talk, Andrew Long, a Certified Profit Streams Trainer and Designer will introduce the Profit Stream Canvas and explain how its elements empower agilists to characterize value in economic terms and improve solution profitability. Andrew will then show how to directly apply these tools to create a value breakdown structure (VBS) that makes the team’s financial impact crystal clear.