What Does MVP Stand For? It’s Not What You Think.
October 7, 2024
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This course is part of multiple programs.
Instructor: Alex Cowan
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(1,335 reviews)
(1,335 reviews)
How to select and test agile practices to adaptively improve your team’s practice of agile
How to create an agile team charter that aligns your team’s focus with company strategy while leaving it free to work creatively
How to facilitate retrospectives with your team to iteratively, collaboratively improve your practice of agile
How to support your team’s transition to agile
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While agile has become the de facto standard for managing digital innovation teams, many wonder if they’re doing it ‘right’. Twitter is full of jokes about how teams say they do agile but don’t ‘really’ do it. The reality is that getting the most out of agile is less about observing specific procedures and more about how a team focuses and measures their progress.
Rather than just boring you with an accounting of agile methodologies, this course focuses on helping you better charter your team’s focus, definition of success, and practice of agile. While learning about agile mainstays like Scrum, XP, and kanban, you’ll also learn to help your team ask the right questions about how they’re working and facilitate good answers on how agile can help. This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.
This week we’ll introduce the four fundamental jobs of software development to help you define what’s important to your team and, hence, which of the many agile practices might make the most sense for you to try out. Then we’ll talk about achieving alignment with your company while maintaining autonomy through an agile team charter. We’ll close by stepping through the leading agile methodologies--Scrum, XP, and kanban. You’ll finish the week with an understanding of how to pair what’s important to your team with the best of what agile has to offer.
20 videos2 readings1 assignment1 discussion prompt
One of the most critical focal points for any team is facilitating a focus on outcomes over output. Without this, you’ll never graduate from responding to requests about your to-do list of output to driving better user outcomes that move the needle for your company. This week, you’ll learn how to define and prioritize what’s important to your team in the areas of learning and deciding, and to pair those with relevant agile practices from Scrum, XP, and kanban.
22 videos1 assignment1 discussion prompt
This week we’ll dive into the jobs of building software and the core management jobs in running an agile team. Agile--and XP in particular--offers a rich body of work on specific coding practices. We’ll step through a few of the most prominent and discuss key linkages with the other concepts and practices you’ve learned. On the job of managing, we’ll dive deeper into what that means and what works in an agile context.
23 videos1 assignment1 discussion prompt
Now that you’ve learned about the four jobs of software development, you’ll have a chance to think through how they relate to your work in this week’s peer-reviewed assignment. You’ll finish the course with a clear plan to accomplish the jobs of learning, deciding, building, and managing for your project.
6 videos1 peer review
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Reviewed on Sep 22, 2019
Excellent material & experiences shared throughout the course. highly recommended for people planning to transition from traditional methodologies to agile methodologies.
Reviewed on Jan 17, 2021
Lots of good content and balance of expert interviews and examples from Spotify and Salesforce. One of my favorite courses in the Digital Product Management Specialization.
Reviewed on Aug 8, 2023
Greetings, I have enjoyed this course so much. it was easy to follow and full of rich information that was light to digest.Extremely grateful for the opportunity, Thank you.
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