Scrum Australia 2014 : Build great products with Scrum + Design Thinking + Lean Startup

I had the privilege of speaking at Scrum Australia 2014 conference couple of months ago. It was a fascinating experience to stand in front of such an energetic and knowledgeable audience and share ideas.  Scrum Australia team had put a lot of effort and energy in getting good speakers not only from Oceania but from abroad as well.  I enjoyed every bit of this conference for 2 days.

The title of my topic was “Building products that customers love by strengthening Scrum with Design Thinking and Lean Startup methods” .

I believe that we need to combine various methods, and use their strengths to build the products. Scrum has its own strengths, and similarly Design Thinking and Lean Startup as well.  However, none of these methods on their own can be used on their own to build great products.

First of all one needs to ensure that any new product idea is viable, desirable and technologically feasible.

It is very important that one has a good understanding of the problem one needs to solve.  Most of the products fail mostly because of lack of understanding of the problems.

Design Thinking comes handy in articulating the problems, and Lean startup could be applied with product testing, pivoting.

I would like to thank  Lynne Cazaly for beautifully depicting my session with the following “Visual Note”

I had put together this idea of bringing the 3 methods together (Scrum + Design Thinking + Lean Startup) long ago. This idea was published by Cutter as an Agile advisor.  Cutter was also gracious enough to make this article public. The entire article is available here if any one is interested in getting  into a detail a bit.

I have been attending Scrum Australia conference without fail since the last couple of years, and return with a load of new knowledge and experience. I am already looking forward for the 2015 conference :-)