With Agile, It’s Not What You Do. It’s What You Do Next.

I’ve been writing a series of tips about product owners, exclusively for my subscribers .

It got me thinking about the times I’ve seen teams and product owners obsessing over their entire product backlogs instead of getting started creating value for their customers.

You do not need to have your entire product backlog figured out to make progress towards your goals.

You only need to know what to do next.

Do the highest priority thing. See how your users and customers respond. Then let their feedback guide what to do next.

The Journey to Agility Happens One Step at a Time

The same thing holds true for transitioning to agile.

You don’t have to have it all figured out to start your journey. You just have to know what to do next.

Build a self-organizing team and give them a challenge.

Ask them to meet that challenge in a short, time boxed iteration (or sprint), during which they meet daily to quickly synchronize their efforts.

The team starts that first iteration by planning what they will accomplish. At the end they demonstrate what has been accomplished and reflect on how well they worked together to achieve it. And then they do it all again.

That's it. Anything else---release planning, burndowns, and so on is optional. Stick to the above and find the local optimizations that fit your environment.

Elements of Agile Survey

I can hear you asking, but what if I’m not sure what to do next?

When there are so many things you could do to improve agile, how do you know which effort will get the best results?

One answer is to take the free Elements of Agile survey on our site . You’ll receive a custom report that tells you:

• How well you and your team are doing agile today
• What you can improve next (and in what order) to help you get better agile results

I hope you’ll take the first step, and check it out.