Agile as a tool to mobilize a top-down culture towards a bottom-up culture

Speaker: María Llosent (HR Director at UQUIFA)

Highlights by Enric Juvé (Product Owner at Capitole Consulting)

• Working with small incremental iterations allow to make experiments and dare to fail, if there are errors they won’t be critical.
• The empowerment of people at all levels of the organization allows for a greater flow of ideas and greater involvement, but it is also a challenge for managers as it implies a certain loss of power. Ideally, there should be a dialogue between the positions that have a more global and transversal vision of the company with those who know the details of each area to make, among all, the best decisions for the company.
• Another challenge for managers is to establish a culture of feedback, allowing employees of lower rank (but more knowledgeable on the work they do) to be free to express their opinions. Giving and receiving feedback and assuming mistakes without penalizing them implies an important cultural change.
• CEOs must give way to Chief Enablers Officers, managers who empower and train employees so that they can provide maximum value and new ideas, assuming greater responsibilities and increasing their level of involvement.
• A trick to empathize more with your colleagues: at the beginning of each meeting, each member should check in and check out their personal context of the day/week so that their possible negative reactions are better understood.

Digital transformation and product development: a great opportunity!

Speaker: José Ramón Gil Cotaina (Scrum Master at Thomas Cook)

Highlights by Noelia de los Muros Navarro (Business Analyst at Capitole Consulting)

Jose Ramón talked about the digital transformation that many products have experienced in recent years. That is, they have undergone changes to adapt. To explain these changes, he used a product as an example: booking a trip.

• Channel change: before, to get this product (a trip) we went to a travel agency. Today there are very few users who continue to go to a travel agency to organize their vacations.
• Product change: when we went to a travel agency we tried to leave it with the maximum booked (flights, hotel, excursions, etc). Now it is very different, we go to different sources for each service we need.
• Competition change: surely we went to the town’s travel agency or one recommended by family or friends. Today, competition is much fiercer. It is a global competition in the digital environment.

Therefore it is important to make business decisions that allow a revolution in the product accepting and adapting to:

• Have a global reach
• Get feedback faster (in real time)
• Validate data even before development (analytics)
• Perform small tests prior to making decisions

To achieve a product revolution it is important:

• To have a product vision, planning a few years in advance and know what we want in the future.
• Focusing on business problems and not only the solution. For that we must have:
  • Product strategy: sequence of releases, alignment and correct communication.
  • Roadmap: Prioritize features and projects and have a correct definition. The definition is very important since it is the main reason for failure. We must know if the product will work or not. That is, if it can provide value, be feasible and usable. To identify whether or not it may work, it is important to anticipate: validate before developing through product discovery sessions that will allow to maximize value.
    • Product delivery: build well
    • Product discovery: build correctly
    • These two processes can go in parallel

Product discovery techniques:

1. Discovery + Mapping / Planning:
   • User journey
   • Product functionalities (prioritized in the release plan)
2. Customer Review → Prototyping → Customer Interview
   • Identify profiles
   • Know usability and behavior
   • Prepare interview: open questions to validate hypothesis (do not ask questions with a closed answer)
3. Prototypes
4. Design sprint: cover all points from the «idea» to «usability» in five days.

In conclusion, it is important to know both product and project and:

• Maximize in value and not volume
• The strategy and roadmap that define the success of the product
• Validate the product
• Fall in love with mistakes