Why We Wrote This Book

As agile coaches and consultants, we’ve led hundreds of retrospectives, and we’ve noticed a pattern. When teams don’t have clarity and alignment at the start of working together on a new deliverable, challenges appear later. Miscommunication, unexamined assumptions, and misperceptions cause teams to make poor decisions. Team members take actions that unintentionally work at cross-purposes and undermine progress. Such dynamics prevent people from seeing the whole system and can cause rifts, resentment, and distrust among stakeholders. Taken together, these dynamics breed failure.

While how you start isn’t the whole answer for a successful end, we’ve never experienced a work effort that started in disarray that was able to end well—at least not without a reset to clarify the core intention. Have you? To achieve their mission, those teams still had to start, even if they skipped this step at the beginning.

We wrote this book to build a wider awareness of the many ways to launch agile teams toward success. We want to show you how to launch a team with attention and intention, and that when sponsors and managers take the time to focus on a liftoff, they see an accelerated leap into the work. In short, we want to help you give your agile work effort a great beginning.