Agile principle number nine states that continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. Let’s look at the design part of this. Good design enhances agility. How? What is good design in the context of agility? How does good design help with agility? — Good design is not just about aesthetics; it’s a strategic asset that enhances an organization’s agility by fostering collaboration, facilitating rapid prototyping and ensuring a user-centric, market responsive approach throughout the development process. But what is good design? …

The relationship between the products we design and the value they create is a complex interplay between various factors. Understanding this relationship is crucial for designers, product managers, and business aiming to create meaningful solutions for their users. This is a systems thinking view on product design. — We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. I am fascinated by digital systems, tools, applications and the design thereof. The things we design talk to us, tell us what they need, show us where they want to go. It’s not only a rational process. It’s not fully…

Organizing around value means structuring and arranging processes, teams, or activities within an organization based on the value they deliver to the customer or end-user. Organizing around value is the tenth principle of the SAFe Lean-Agile principles and it is one of the key the principles that is used to design the Agile Teams and the the teams of those teams, the Agile Release Trains (ARTs). —

The goal of leadership is the empowerment of others. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader. But how does one go about empowering others? What skills does one need and how does one learn those skills? In his book The Shaman and the Manager (in Dutch), Sven Goedbloed offers us some interesting principles from the shamanic traditions to guide us towards empowering leadership.

I am a huge fan of the Product Owner model of leadership. I don’t know exactly why, it just resonated with me from the moment I discovered it. Sometimes you fall in love with something with your heart and your head takes a lot of time to catch up. But…

As I see it, Agile is about people and interactions and not about processes and tools. This is the first line of the Agile Manifesto and the reason I was drawn to Agile in the first place. So why is it we end up talking only about processes and tools and not about people and interactions? Let’s talk about one of the things that happen between people: unpredictability. Unpredictability is one of the reasons Agile ways of working exist. Managing unpredictability is one of the goals of Agile ways of working.

There is one thing that separates great design from good design and that is the story the design tells. There are different levels of design. Nice design looks good. It’s aesthetic: pleasing to the senses. The next level is functional: the design solves a problem. But the apex of design is storytelling. If the design looks good and solves a problem, the designer is doing a good job. But if the designer managers to tell a story, design has the ability to change things.

Writing a good user story is a delicate art. It should be clear, inspiring, leave enough room for creativity, and embody the product vision. It should be a self-contained piece of work without describing the solution. The user story is about WHAT, the HOW is up to the scrum team to figure out. Thinking in questions is much more creative than thinking in solutions but every once in a while I fall into the trap of thinking in solutions. Then I write a user story that is too descriptive. The result is that opportunities are missed, thinking becomes too narrow, and solutions become sloppy.

One thing I didn’t understand until recently about how we organize ourselves in organizations is that authority is given. Authority is given to people so they can use it for good. Authority is the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. Authority (noun) is the power…