Audiobook Giveaway: Driving Value with Sprint Goals
Only US or UK subscribers Are Eligible
I’m proud to announce the audiobook version of my book Driving Value with Sprint Goals is finally available!
Head on over to Amazon or Audible to secure your copy. You can also listen the audiobook for free if you get a 1 month trial.
Please leave a rating or review on Amazon after you’re finished, it would mean a lot to me ❤️.
Also for people who’ve already read a physical copy or digital version please consider leaving review, it supports me in my writing a lot! For those who’ve already done so, thank you very much.
Chance to Win a Copy of My Book
For people in the US and the UK, I’ve received some copies I can give away to readers of my newsletter.
All you have to do is leave a comment on this post on my Substack, describing an Agile horror story you’ve personally experienced.
I’ll then do a raffle with all the participants, and send a copy to the lucky winners. You have until the end of this week (12th of January) to leave comment and participate in the contest!
I want to stress once again, I unfortunately only have copies to give away to people in the US and the UK, so this is a condition to be eligible to win the prize.
My horror story was the time I was told that my scrum master accountabilities were being absorbed into the engineering manager role and that all the devs in the team would now report to me and I was also accountable for the delivery!
This experience I’m about to describe is more specific to Scrum, but it’s a concept that applies to any framework that uses User Stories.
How to slice up work into user stories is an issue that can be contentious with almost any new team. The struggle I’ve come across more than once. Is those on the Product Management side encouraging vertical slicing where each piece can have some sort of use in end of itself, or horizontal slicing which makes it easier for developers specializing in front end or back end to own a piece that is completely theirs.
Horizontal slicing has always in my experience, created additional problems. Being able to tell stakeholders when a certain piece is complete is more difficult when it’s split up into front end versus back end.
On a particular project after I gave my recommendation on how user stories should be broken down I got a lot of pushback from developers. So I told them that while I disagree with them and recommend against what they want to do we could try it if that’s what they really wanted.
After a couple of sprints, where work was divided up by the type of development, it became more difficult to report on our progress. We could report on how far along we were in an epic, but nothing more specific than that.
The developers then agreed to go with my original recommendation. So the additional work in front of us was then to take dozens of stories and group them into some kind of work item between the story and epic level.
It’s not so difficult when that’s how you do it from the beginning but to change strategies in the middle of your build, phase isn’t easy.
Hopefully this is a lesson that will stick with everyone on that team.