The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Part II. Focusing on Value

You walk into work on a crisp October morning. Your last team was fully remote, but your current team prefers in-person work. Communication styles are very different, you muse to yourself, but Agile is much the same.

Your team is a fluent Focusing team. As a team, you’re very good at understanding customer needs, coming up with good ideas, and focusing your work on the most valuable thing you can do. There’s room for improvement, particularly around defects and deployment, and people have been talking about investing in Delivering zone fluency to solve those problems, but management is very happy with your work.

Some people on the team are advocating for your team to take full ownership as an Optimizing team, but, for now, your team’s priorities are determined by Hanna, a product manager in the marketing department. She’s pretty busy and her boss isn’t willing to assign her to your team full-time.

Speaking of product direction, today is demo day. Every week, your team releases a new version of its software, then makes a plan for the next week of development. Once per month, you gather together your major stakeholders, show what you’ve done, and get their feedback. You used to do it more often, but stakeholders couldn’t be bothered to show up that frequently. So now you have less frequent, chunkier demos, and people are excited to see what’s new. When you want faster feedback, you give private demos to interested individuals.

Hanna leads the demo, as ...