Headless Chickens VS the Golden?Thread

Sooner Safer Happier has these great sound bites on the Headless Chicken antipattern:

• “Teams churning out stuff disconnected from strategy”
• “Features are disconnected from customer needs”
• “Teams are measured by velocity?—?by activity”

What happens to teams that stay in this mode? In my experience, their funding gets cut??. Sadly, this pattern almost seems to be the norm for ‘agile’ teams.?

In resisting arbitrary milestones, teams can accidentally reject alignment to goals the organisation cares about.

How can you become a valued team? Align your work with outcomes the organisation does care about.

The Golden Thread?pattern

Many teams are so close, and yet so far, from a visible Golden Thread. The goals are hidden in a deck or document somewhere and the backlog is incomprehensible to anyone outside the team. Wouldn’t it be amazing if every team member could ask ‘Why?’, all the way up to the strategy? And be able to say ‘Why not’, when work is misaligned. Product Owners would also have a real story to tell about the impact of the team’s work.

Fixing your Golden Thread with the?3-Cs

Ron Jefferies’ classic article on Card, Conversation, Confirmation applies just as much to the linkages in your golden thread as to the User Stories themselves.

Card

The principle here is to record the information in writing somewhere everyone can see it. In these days of hybrid working, we don’t get to use lovely stationery anymore and our work will be in a backlog tool. The good news is that most backlog tools enable a rollup of your work to a higher-order goal. Some of them even put the ‘orphaned’ backlog items in your face so you are nudged to go and fix them up.

Conversation

From experience, getting work initially aligned will take loads of conversations and feedback loops as shown below. Once the habit is established, it becomes natural to ask the right questions and link things up straight away when creating and refining the backlog items.

This linkage will also surface the many assumptions being made. Why do we think feature X will move the needle on the desired outcome? We start to learn from the Underpants Gnomes and reject work that isn’t going to make a difference.

The first attempt at linking a backlog to goals may get a reaction of “Oh no, not more JIRA admin.” So encourage the team to use the law of two feet and start with people who voluntarily care about ‘Why’. They are probably the angsty team members who challenge priorities in backlog refinement.

Confirmation

For User Stories, confirmation means an acceptance test confirms we got it right (or not). And the focus is on understanding the acceptance criteria as early as possible.

For the Golden Thread, we first confirm that work is aligned. Tracking these metrics confirms alignment (as much as metrics can):

• Bottom-up Golden Thread?—?Percentage of all backlog items linked to the strategic outcomes. A basic hygiene measure.
• Top-down Golden thread?—?Stories completed over time per outcome. This will reveal where priorities are playing out and whether you have too many outcomes in progress.

We also need to test those assumptions that the features we build will impact the desired outcome. This will force us to listen to customers early and start iterating on their feedback. Having the whole team engaged in testing assumptions is way more effective than leaving it to the Product Owner to figure out.

Mindset shift

With new habits come unexpected benefits. By challenging the alignment of work, the team’s mindset shifts from the Headless Chicken to customer value. “Churning out stuff” becomes purposeful design, prioritisation and learning. Happy threading.