How will the PSU course help leadership teams innovate?
The PSU course is a Professional Scrum with User Experience course, developed by Scrum.Org, that teaches product owners, business leaders, and entrepreneurs how to combine Lean UX, design thinking, and professional Scrum to develop products that delight customers and align with business strategy and objectives.
In essence, building the most valuable products, in the most valuable way, at the most valuable time.
The Scrum Framework: Pros and Cons.
Scrum is very good at helping product development and project management teams to deliver high value, high quality work to customers on a frequent and continuous basis.
In theory, we are attempting to work on the most valuable products and features, but in my experience – and according to many surveys in this space – approximately 60% plus of features and products that are built should never have been built.
In other words, highly productive teams become feature factories.
They simply churn out feature after feature without validating that the work they are doing is feasible, viable, and valuable to either customers or the organization. It is just more stuff being built and delivered on a regular cadence.
The Professional Scrum User Experience course.
The PSU (Professional Scrum User Experience) course teaches you how to discover which items you should build, and more importantly, quickly, and cost-effectively evaluate which products and features you shouldn’t build.
It allows us to create a system that empowers us to discover whether there are better ideas that should be pursued and whether there are better ways for us to discover where value can be captured or created.
So, the PSU course helps you avoid filling a product development funnel with lots of ideas that simply shouldn’t be there. It helps you focus on the problems you are attempting to solve, the value that you are attempting to create, and whether that is economically viable for your organization as well as the customer.
- Is this feature going to have an impact on our customer’s environment?
- Is this feature something the customer would value and be willing to pay for?
- Does this product solve a specific problem or is it just a great idea?
- Is this feature viable for the organization? Can we make money? Can we grow?
And so forth.
A relentless focus on value.
The PSU course will teach you how to explore opportunities more effectively.
- Are there cheap experiments you could run to validate the idea or opportunity?
- Are there potential customers you could interview to understand whether they would buy?
- Are there potential customers you could run a pilot program with to demonstrate value?
And so forth.
A system of product development that means you are focused on validating the opportunity before investing significant amounts of time, money, and effort on producing the product or feature.
A system that allows you to quickly and effectively identify what you shouldn’t be building, pursuing, or attempting to solve.
Lean Start Up
The LEAN start up is built on the idea of running a lot of experiments to validate opportunities for product development, but the criticism for this approach is that so many of these experiments ran into production, which isn’t a sustainable or effective way to grow a business/
If you’re constantly building prototypes but haven’t validated whether it is worth building the prototype or not, you’re just burning cash faster than it’s coming in.
Yes, building prototypes is important, but that’s a fairly late stage of the product development cycle and there are far cheaper, quicker, and more effective ways to validate whether your product idea is viable and valuable before investing significant sums of money in developing that product.
LEAN UX
One of the things I love about LEAN UX is that is contains an 8-box canvas which allows you to work through a product development system before committing significant amounts of time, money, and effort into developing prototypes.
- Box 1: Business Problem
- Box 2: Business Outcomes
- Box 3: User Analysis
- Box 4: User Outcomes & Benefits
- Box 5: Solutions
- Box 6: Hypotheses
- Box 7: The most important thing we need to learn first.
- Box 8: The least amount of work needed to learn the next most important thing.
You’re identifying which elements present the most risk and could cause the most damage versus the most viable, cost-effective approach to identifying whether you are on the right track.
It also encourages a process of discovery, learning, and validation rather than acting from expert assumptions. Sometimes, even the best minds in the room aren’t the only validation we need to commit time and resources to a project or product.
We need hard evidence. We need empirical data.
So, in short, this is what the PSU course will help you do.
Follow a proven system for discovering what products to build, what products not to build, and how to keep future product development aligned with customer and organizational value.
About John Coleman
John Coleman has deep experience and expertise working with executives, #leadership teams and product development teams to achieve increased #organizationalagility and create environments where creativity and collaboration produce high-performance teams.
https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility – social and podcast links
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