Back to basics

Doing plannings, daily standups and retrospective ceremonies does not make a company Agile. Agile is a mindshift and it's hard... many companies try to become Agile only to fail in the process and get no results.

Studying modern movements, such as Heart of Agile and Modern Agile, are cornerstones to getting the gist of what the Agile mindset represents.

The Product Squad

Product Managers/Owners are united together as a core team, versus being distributed on various teams (e.g. Scrum teams). Working closely together, they can focus on product strategy, company goals and outcomes, versus distributing work in fixed teams with limitations in engineering and people skills.

#strategy #direction #priority

The Engineering talent pool

Instead of using people resources to form specific fixed teams (e.g. Scrum teams), engineers are united under a common pool of engineering talent, cultivating equal opportunities, knowledge sharing and guest leadership.

#opportunity #learning

The Missions

Product is working together as a coherent team and define a set of Missions that are aligned with company goals, focusing on desired scope and expected outcome.

They answer questions such as "what do we want to achieve as a company in the next couple of months", "what are the battles we should pick".

#value #customer #importance

The Hero Squads

Once Missions have been defined, they are pitched to the Engineering talent pool and ad-hoc teams are formed, the Hero Squads, with one sole purpose: fulfill the Missions by maintaining focus on work to be done. A Hero Squad is dismissed when the desired outcome has been achieved.

#focus #delivery

The Guardian Squad

In the real world, engineering teams are fighting between delivery of new features, management of bugs, technical debt and customer support. The Guardian Squad is a rotating team formed by the Engineering talent pool with one holy duty: protect the Hero Squads from losing focus. They act as the shield against context switching, they are the protectors of the Missions.

#maintenance #support

Mission cycles

Agile Squads work in 1-6 week cycles. Each cycle starts with a Mission briefing event and ends with a Mission debriefing event.

At the end of every cycle, the Product Squad evaluates the progress and makes decisions on whether a Mission should continue to the next cycle, should be aborted or new Missions should be pitched to the Engineering talent pool.

Other departments

Converting a Mission to a successful outcome, versus a meaningless output, requires effort from other company departments as well, such as People Operations, Customer Success, Demand Generation and Sales.

The Product Squad is the beating heart coordinating these efforts gathering required input during the definition phase and triggering proper company-wide actions during Mission development to reach the expected outcome, serving customer needs.

Allocating and securing the required space to perform the above actions is one of the benefits offered by the Agile Squads framework.