Agile in CX - Slow Is Smooth. Smooth Is Fast.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. When asked for a favorite quote, this Navy Seals saying is always what I think of first. I love paradoxes, and on first impression that’s exactly what this sounds like. But think about it more, and you find a deep truth emerges. Preparation, planning, thoughtfulness allows you to move forward more consistently, and confidently. Consistent progress in the right direction always seems faster in retrospect.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. That’s how applying Agile to Customer Experience feels to me. Agile is planful, it’s contemplative, it makes incremental, measured progress towards clearly defined goals. The modest reach of many sprints feels slow. But the relentless delivery of results, sprint, after sprint, is smooth. And the real impact that piles up after a few sprints feels like it happened in no time at all. Fast.
In this week’s edition of the CX Patterns Podcast and Newsletter, I’m reflecting on lessons learned in the beginning phase of adopting Agile for my CX work. Make no mistake, I’m a beginner when it comes to Agile. But, as you’ll hear in the podcast, where I talked with my former LinkedIn colleague, Lara Nowak , I had a great teacher.
What should customer experience pros know about adopting agile?
How do you know how much work fits into a sprint?
Lara joked that it is Trial & Error all the way down. But then she highlighted an important tool to help figure it out. Planning Poker is the tool employed by Agile teams to estimate how much effort or time a piece of work will take. Using the Fibonacci Sequence , Planning poker enables each member of the Agile team to estimate timing during Sprint Planning. What I love about this, is that it resists group think and coercion. Everyone puts forward their best guess, using the Fibonacci Sequence , 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 days in terms of how long it will take.
The magic of the Fibonacci sequence is it grows exponentially. The shorter the timespan, the more precise you can be. As you get into longer time horizons, you should be less precise, as it’s harder to compare. This helps force exponential thinking, a famously hard concept for humans to grasp.
How did we do? Sprint Retros = Performance Reviews
The retros at the end of each sprint are one of my favorite aspects of Agile. It’s a great ritual for forcing the team to pause, and reflect on what went well, what needs to be tweaked before the next sprint and what or who should be celebrated. The dwell time allows you to observe and perceive what you’ve actually accomplished. The beauty of the slow but smooth progress of Agile is that is fast, but you won’t necessarily perceive that unless you stop and observe it. The sprint retros give you the opportunity to do that.
At LinkedIn, we use a template we found in Miro for the Retros – The Treasure Hunt . It’s a full metaphor – complete with a visual that includes Pirates, Sweet Fruits, Message in a bottle and Hidden Treasure. I love the commitment to the bit. It is a lot like Rose, Bud, Thorn, if you’re familiar with that approach. Pirates are the Thorns, Roses are the Sweet Fruits, Buds are the Hidden Treasures. And Messages in the bottle are what you want to do differently in the next sprint. What I love about that metaphor is that you put the message in the bottle, drop it in the ocean, and then “discover” it yourself. You get to apply it in the next sprint, benefiting from your learning process immediately. Each sprint is an opportunity to iterate your approach, and the message in a bottle gives you the starting point for that iteration.
Agile For CX Final Thoughts: Adopt It, Adapt It
Don’t be shy about starting using Agile, and then don’t be shy about making changes so that it works for you. In our podcast discussion, Lara mentions that we (LinkedIn) changed the Planning Poker estimate from one of effort to one of time, a unit of measure we were more comfortable thinking in.
The fundamentals of the process were unchanged. We were coming together as a team, but putting in individual bets on the amount of time a task would take. This is important as a step, so I want to tease it out a bit. When everyone gets to submit their independent estimate of time, you are pushing back against group think. You get to discover everyone’s best guess, and use that discovery to have a discussion. Why does Sam think it will take 21 days to conduct customer interviews when Lara thinks it will only take 13? Well, because Lara did this exact same activity in her last project, and the task took 12 days. She’s confident she knows how to get it done in 13 days. That’s the basis for a conversation that will lead to a well-scoped set of activities for the next sprint.
One Last Thing: The Agile Community Is A True Community
We have pulled in so many templates and tools from different members of the Agile community. One of the most wonderful things about Agile is how willing everyone is to share their knowledge, share their tools, share their learnings. It is a fantastic resource to help with both adoption, and with ongoing use. So take advantage of the community.
With that in mind, I want to encourage comments, stories, questions as a response to this newsletter and podcast edition. Let’s emulate the Agile community and share what we’re learning and doing with Agile.
Links:
More background on the meaning of Slow is Smooth. Smooth is fast .
Miro – Tool for customer journey mapping, among other experience design methodologies