The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Part IV. Optimizing Outcomes

October has rolled around again. Last year, your team achieved Delivering fluency (see Part III). At the time, some team members wanted to push for Optimizing fluency, too, but management was skeptical. You couldn’t get the support you needed.

Since you’ve achieved Delivering fluency, though, your team has been firing on all cylinders. Productivity went way up; defects, way down. Hanna, your product manager, was having trouble keeping up. She delegated more and more responsibilities to the team, which rose to the challenge.

It got noticed. Hanna was singing your praises to the marketing director, and your boss was talking you up to the engineering director. The time was right to push for Optimizing fluency again. This time, it worked. Hanna was assigned to join your team full time. Not only that, she got permission to try “the Agile experiment.”

“The Agile experiment” is what they’re calling the way Hanna works with your team. Instead of having to go through a yearly planning exercise like the rest of Marketing, she got permission to own your team’s financials. She meets with her boss regularly to share statistics such as revenue and customer retention, and she’s constantly trying out new ideas and experiments. (Her colleagues are jealous. They still have to go through six weeks of budget and target-setting hell every year.)

It’s not just Hanna. The whole team is getting in on the action. Although Hanna is first among equals when it comes to product ...