Startup, Scaleup, Screwup.

13The Entropy Tango

Keep a Product Backlog with Minimum Viable Features and Experiment Stories updated through ongoing Backlog Maintenance.

 

There are hundreds of books about startups and scaleups and nearly all of them are about U.S. companies. I think I’ve heard and read the founding story of AirBNB more than 20 times now. It’s a good story. It’s simple, remarkable, and memorable. But nobody ever writes about Booking.com, which competes directly with AirBNB, and is at least five times larger. Why? Maybe because Booking is headquartered in Amsterdam, rather than San Francisco. Their stories don’t bounce around the Silicon Valley echo chamber, where most other authors tend to find their inspiration.

And so, I went to Amsterdam to learn from Melanie Wessels, who is an Agile Coach at Booking.com, how her colleagues at the company do their jobs.

We want there to be chaos so that teams can innovate and be creative and have autonomy. But we also want some form of organization so that there are boundaries within which the teams can innovate. So, there are a couple of things we consider required for all teams. We call them the Booking Agile Essentials. Three of the items are the Agile Retrospective, the Daily Standup, and having a Product Backlog. These are the three practices that we say every team needs to have.

Melanie Wessels, Agile Coach at Booking.com, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ...