What Are You Bringing to the Office?
One Lab Zero colleague has been bringing fresh-baked bread to work every morning for the last four years.
One Lab Zero colleague has been bringing fresh-baked bread to work every morning for the last four years.
You’re our executive sponsor. You’re our business stakeholder. You’re our subject matter expert. You’re the business analyst who mocked up the data we’re presenting. You’re the head of product.
People fight about all kinds of things. The desk near the window. Spaces versus tabs. Whether you can play more than three Sex Pistols songs in a row over the office hi-fi.
Your co-worker comes back from lunch and you can see immediately that they ate a poppy-seed bagel. They’re wearing their lunch on their face, and this is exactly what’s going on with your website.
Agile runs through everything we do at Lab Zero: how we explore customer and market needs; how we describe a problem space and identify product hypotheses; how we course-correct our design and our software seeking qualified feedback along the way; and, of course, how we organize ourselves. We also help our customers integrate these methods throughout their business.
For us, Agile falls somewhere between Faith and Practice. We believe that iterative building and learning makes a huge difference for the types of products we work on. Forming testable hypotheses, working with real users, and delivering on a rapid cadence are just some of the things that we insist on when we take on a new client.
Lab Zero is a pretty flat place. Organization-wise. When we’re working with clients our team members hold leadership positions because they’re able, personable, and have grit. But when we’re back at Lab Zero, we’re a flat org. There aren’t a bunch of VPs and Managing Directors like you see at many design/build outfits. But we’re growing now, and because The Number One Thing is the Team, we’re choosing now to promote some folks who have what it takes to help grow our teams and to set standards within those teams.
People get great software product ideas all the time. Modern software development injects reality to the picture. Agile and Lean practices, test-driven development, customer interviews: plans and teams that are tethered to reality won't float away and build something pointless.
Software teams have been adopting Agile methods for decades. Small teams have crushed it, producing higher quality products in shorter time horizons with fewer bugs and less waste. And yet enterprise Agile transformation programs often utterly fail to produce the business outcomes their sponsors and proponents hope for. Why?