In Practice: The Yardbirds

Steve Holyer, agile coach and product management consultant, shares a story about a team that couldn’t achieve success until its members discovered and examined their purpose and context (including the system they worked in), and aligned themselves to do the work. Notice that he starts with alignment activities before moving to purpose and context. The order of chartering the elements isn’t as important as the fit for your particular team situation.

The Yardbirds Were in Trouble

Steve looked around the table and saw a group of competent, experienced women and men. Many were old enough to have successfully raised their children and seen them off to college and into their own homes and careers. Others still had children at home. Most of the team members had been with the company ten to fifteen years. They could give you an impressive list of past project accomplishments on other teams. They were the Yardbirds team.

But now, the Yardbirds were in trouble.  Their Scrum master had asked Steve to come to the planning meeting to observe and perhaps interject some coaching help.

As the planning meeting ground on, Steve realized that Tammy was getting more and more agitated.  Finally, when the Scrum master and product owner started talking about commitment, Tammy lost it.

“We have no idea what it is we’re supposed to build. Those math library user stories—they just came out of nowhere.  Do they even add value?”

Tammy barely took time to breathe as she continued, spluttering, “How can I make a commitment when I don’t understand the user stories?  Our backlog grooming is worthless, and what about our dependencies on the comms team?” Her face was getting redder and redder, and now angry, frustrated tears were streaming down her face.

“And, you all are so disrespectful. If this is how things are going to be on this team, I’m really ready to quit. I’m not going to work like this anymore!” Tammy’s rapid-fire stream of words came to an abrupt stop as she sat there, glaring angrily around while tears ran down her cheeks.

Tammy had been with Westenwalder’s main software development center for twelve years.  She loved it there. She could walk to work, and her mother lived nearby to care for Tammy’s two children when they weren’t in school. And now she was ready to quit and look for a new job in the city, which would come with an hour commute, both ways.

Steve opened his mouth to intervene with some observations about conflict and stress when Justin, the product owner, stood up and said with cold, calm defiance, “No one appreciates the work I put into creating this backlog. Everyone just whines and complains, We don’t know what we are building. I’ve thought this over, and I hereby resign my job as product owner, effective immediately.”

Tears were also running down Justin’s face.

Before anyone else could say anything, Paul—the newest member of the team—shouted, “I am done with meetings that go nowhere. I’m not coming to another one of these !#$*ing planning meetings until the rest of you get your acts together.”

Before another team member could melt down, Travis, the brash manager, said, “Obviously this meeting can’t go on. We’re stopping for today.”

The team sure got out of that room quickly. No one spoke to each other.

Steve stayed behind with Travis.

Travis was fuming. “This team is worthless,” he railed. “I’m going to have to fire every one of them and replace them with external folks who can deliver.”

“You told me at lunch that Tammy saved the last project she was on. And Justin has apparently delivered some of the company’s best projects, from what Jamarkus tells me. All the developers seem to have really strong skills. What’s going on now? What’s keeping the team from producing results on this project?” Steve asked.

“They’ve been a Scrum team for nine months now, and they haven’t delivered anything that I want. They haven’t delivered anything! Obviously, they don’t have the skills or knowledge to do their jobs. I’m going to have to take some drastic actions to fix this. My bonus is tied to the next release. If they don’t deliver the next product release by the end of next quarter, I’m out of a bonus.  And yeah, I’m probably fired. Yeah, I’ve got to fix this before it ends my career.”

Yes, the Yardbirds were in trouble.

What’s the Product Vision?

“How well does the Yardbird team understand your vision for the product?” Steve asked. He was eating lunch with Travis the next day.

“Well, I’ve presented my vision so many times. They’re just not capable of understanding it. They’re not remotely visionary,” Travis griped.

Steve was always telling people, “It’s never too late to lift off your team!”

“You know,” he said to Travis, “if you want to get this team off the ground in time to deliver something by the end of next quarter, I would suggest a liftoff. And with the things I heard, I think it would be useful to spend a lot of time on context.”

“No,” Travis answered. “The team just had their company-mandated offsite. They’ve played their team-building games, taken a personality test, and role-played how to talk to each based on their color/shape scores.  They created a charter of team values that’s framed and hanging on the wall. We’ve done all that touchy-feely suff, and besides, it’s much too late to have a liftoff now,” Travis answered. “The team needs to just get busy!”

“Okay. Let’s just do the release planning.” Steve started working on a facilitation plan for a release-planning session that included just enough of a liftoff.

Release Planning and Liftoff

Team Yardbirds were gathered, tensely, for two days of release planning.

Steve surprised the team when he said, “We’re going to spend forty-five minutes lifting off this meeting!”

Jamarkus groaned, “Oh no, more touchy-feely stuff.”

Steve didn’t show any signs he’d heard Jamarkus.

Travis looked restless, but he had agreed, as an experiment, to go along with Steve’s facilitation plan—for now.

Picturing the last meeting, Steve asked the group, “How do you want to be with each other today?” And he asked, “How will you handle conflicts?” He asked them to write their answers on sticky notes. Then he asked the team to create a poster of working agreements that started, “We will work best together today when....” The team also wrote simple rules together. One of its simple rules was respect each other.

After forty-five minutes, the team had created just enough alignment that they felt ready to begin an all-day release-planning meeting with some confidence that it wouldn’t literally end in tears like last time. Steve laughed, “So that might have been the most immediate planning horizon ever! A six-hour horizon.” He gestured to a drawing of a telescope he’d taped to the wall. “Now let’s widen our view out to what my friend Ellen calls the big planning horizon.”

Let’s Talk About Your Product Vision

Steve had been working all week with Travis to help him crystalize his product vision as well as the team’s mission. He thought Travis had finally honed vision into something that the team could grasp.

Now, for the first time, the team worked with Travis to refine his vision.  And everyone seemed to be enjoying working to create a clear purpose.

After lunch, Steve asked the team to refocus the planning horizon again.

“Now we are looking at the intermediate horizon. The preview of the next release,” he explained. Then he asked Travis to present the team’s mission that it had prepared for this release.

It didn’t take long for the team to refine the mission and begin to write mission tests for the release. The team grumbled a bit about having to write down the mission tests.  But the members began to see the value when they ended up further refining the mission as they struggled to find mission tests!

Finally, the team understood its mission clearly enough that it could start examining the larger context of its product delivery. And, it was still working together—like a team—after nearly a day in the same room. That was something that seemed unlikely last week.

Explore the Context

“Now comes the fun part,” Steve told the group. “This is what I’ve been really looking forward to. Let’s explore the context you’re working in.

“Who do you have to interact with in order to succeed at your mission?” he asked.

“You know, all the usual stakeholders,” Jamarkus answered for the rest of the team, who nodded in agreement. They all started to look bored with this turn of events.

“Okay, humor me. Who are the stakeholders?”

“You know,” Tammy sighed. “The ops team. Master Hack. We’re going to have to coordinate with all the other core development teams.”

“Okay, okay. I’m not going to be able to hold all these new names in my head. Let’s make a poster.”

Steve went to a set of flip chart pages he’d taped to the wall and drew a circle in the middle. “That’s you. That’s your team. Now I’d like you to take sticky notes and start noting the names of the people you will have to interact with.”

To give the team an example, he took a block of sticky notes and wrote Master Hack on the first one. He peeled it away and stuck it to the wall near the circle for the team.

“By the way, who—or what—is Master Hack?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s Robert on the ops team,” Jamarkus answered. “He’s the only one who can run the build/release script for us.”

Interesting. Steve made a note for later, when it came to explore project risks.

As the team started creating new sticky notes of names of stakeholders and departments to put on the poster, Steve asked them to place the notes on the poster to physically indicate how they were related to the team. The stakeholders with whom close interaction would be required—or whose interaction would have a huge impact on the mission—were stuck closer to the team circle. Those who had less interaction or impact, were placed further out.

Tammy saw the pattern emerging, and she wrote all the names of the Yardbirds on separate stickies and placed them in the center circle. And as the larger picture began to take shape, Steve asked the Yardbirds to start drawing lines and arrows labeled to show what the Yardbirds needed from their partners outside their circle—and also to show what the stakeholders needed from the Yardbirds.

After about fifteen minutes of activity, things were starting to slow down, and Steve said, “Okay. I think that is probably good enough for now.”

Bill, who usually didn’t say much when the team was together, said, “We need to put Grace up there.”

“Oh, this project will need some help from regulatory, then,” Steve realized as Bill added the sticky note. Grace was the attorney who sat on the third floor. “We’ll keep this poster here, so you can add to it as things come up.”

It Won’t Be Easy

“I don’t think it’s going to be easy to deliver your release mission. Do you?” Steve asked the Yardbirds after they had taken a break to stretch their legs.

“What skills and experience do you need to deliver the mission this release?” he continued. “What do you need to know how to do?”

Slowly, the team members began to call out a list of of things they needed to know. Steve pointed to a new blank poster and the ever-present pile of sticky notes and nontoxic markers, and said, “Write it down.”

As some kind of poster started to take shape, Tammy started to look concerned and unhappy.

“This is impossible. We’re great developers, but we don’t have all these skills,” she blurted. “You can’t expect me to know all of this.” Tammy waved at the blob of stickies.

This was a moment Travis had predicted, and a few other people who worked with the product had said something similar to Steve. It seemed like the Yardbirds didn’t have the know-how to pull this off. But Steve also had other ideas about the strength of teams.

“Okay. Tammy, can you and the team start making a grid on this poster? Put the stickies with the skills and know-how you need along the top and list your names down the side,” he said.

Tammy held back, her arms folded across her chest, while Bill, Paul, and Jamarkus made a creation of the blue tape and stickies grid Steve asked for.

Steve handed some race car stickers to Tammy. “Now, everyone take stickers and put them on the grid we just made. For each skill, stick one race car if you know enough about this to ask questions. Stick two race cars if you kinda have this skill or if you’ve been to a class on it. Stick three race cars if you are an expert in this. And draw an explosion around the race cars if you would enjoy teaching others how to do this.”

“What if we don’t have that skill?” Tammy asked.

“Then leave that square empty.”

Tammy and the team crowded around the wide poster on the wall and started placing stickers. Soon Tammy was looking unhappy again. “We’re missing vital know-how,” she said. “We’re never going to be able to do this.”

Some of the other team members were more optimistic and started to talk to Tammy about ways to fill in the missing skills. Steve pointed to the poster with stakeholder interactions. He asked the team to start identifying how it could ask about or acquire the know-how it didn’t have. Soon the team had listed more people and more interactions on that poster. And Tammy was starting to look happy again.

Achieving Liftoff

The clock on the wall read 5:25, and Steve saw through the window that the sun was beginning to set. The team had also completed a prospective analysis and identified the resources (not the people) it would need to fulfill its mission.

Everyone was tired. But everyone looked happy.

Steve reminded the Yardbirds that tomorrow they’d look at story mapping for the release and create the release plan. When he asked for immediate feedback, the team agreed that the day would give good return on investment.

Steve remarked that the mood was noticeably improved compared to the last meeting.

Tammy sighed, “Well, it’s really good that we finally understand what we’re supposed to be building. And things don’t feel hopeless now we understand all this context! Why didn’t we do this before?”

“I think context often gets overlooked,” Steve joked, “because we taught Scrum masters and coaches something about team alignment. And we taught product owners something about product purpose. Then we got rid of all the project managers who already understood a lot about making context visible. So of course we have a hole there.”

Tammy, who had listed project management as one of the skills she was ready to teach, started to redden.  “I’m joking!” Steve reassured her.

“I really am joking,” he continued when she didn’t look completely satisfied. “We didn’t get rid of any project managers. But many project managers are looking for a way to contribute value to an agile team. Some of you can add lots of value by facilitating conversations about context. Plus, this is agile product work. So you’ll get lots of chances. I’m sure you’ll continue to revisit and refine our work today at each new planning horizon, like next week when you start sprint planning for the first sprint of the release.”

Tammy didn’t answer, but everyone could see she was thinking about that.

Travis was smiling as people left the room to go home for the day. The Yardbirds were smiling, too.

“Houston,” Travis said, “I think we finally achieved liftoff!”

The Yardbirds Will Be Fine

The next day and onward, the team continued to work with the elements of purpose, alignment, and especially context on all its planning horizons. Justin continued to serve the team as product owner until he was lured away to be a product owner for a sexy music-streaming startup. Tammy also continued working on the Yardbirds team. She continued walking to work and raising her family nearby. She moved into the product owner role when Justin entered the music business.

Steve moved on, as independent coaches and consultants do, to work with other teams and other companies.

Through adaptive planning and a good understanding of their context, the Yardbirds delivered enough value in their first release after their liftoff that Travis earned his bonus. And the team earned its, too.

The road isn’t always smooth. But the Yardbirds are going to be just fine.