Scrum, Design Thinking & Innovation

Notes from IBM: Your frameworks are making you stupid.

Scrum & Design Thinking

“Scrum and Design Thinking exist so that below average people can produce average products.”

I’d say that sometimes at IBM. People would look at me like I was from Mars.

Then I’d go back to my spaceship and leave. Of course, I was just trying to be provocative. Except it’s also true. It’s like saying “if God meant us to eat kale, He wouldn’t have made it taste like kale.”

Frameworks such as Scrum and Design Thinking are good if you’ve got a lousy team or a very green team; they can help provide guideposts so things go ok — just ok. They are, of course, frameworks for micromanaging. My dev framework is:

1. Hire a great team. (You trust their insights, their innovation, and their creativity. Obviously they have the skills.)

2. Agree on objectives. Fairly big picture stuff.

3. Agree on a budget and timeframe (like battle plans, know that it all goes out the window once the first shot is fired).

4. Get out of the way.

#4 never happened at IBM. Of course, some of the others didn’t happen either, but the constant micromanaging was comically brutal because it was often done by people whose technical expertise don’t extend beyond the Design tab in PowerPoint.

Design Thinking exists because someone in Armonk over-ordered Post-It notes. That’s the only explanation I have. Also, big tech loves jargon because they think it’s a replacement for culture. Most annoying about Design Thinking is its intense reliance on focus-grouped feedback interpreted through jargon on Post-Its. More often than not, true innovation can’t be found in what people say they want. When Steve Ballmer heard about Apple’s $500 web-surfing phone, he laughed.[1] If Apple design-thunk the iPhone, it would have been a PalmPre (fastest selling phone in Sprint’s history until Apple’s vision crushed it like a Panzer division rolling through a sandcastle competition). Ballmer knew that no focus group reported an interest in a $500 web phone.

Of course, innovation requires space, and all the new ideas will initially sound stupid, and most of them will be … but that’s ok.

But ditch the frameworks and you allow people to explore, make mistakes, innovate, fix problems preemptively and maybe come up with something very cool that was never in the product roadmap. I’ve witnessed it — it’s real. You just need to allow for mistakes and trust the engineers. You know how you can post video on Facebook? You know Zuckerberg thought that was a dumb idea and his engineers did it anyway? You don’t get that from daily micromanaging meetings. Scrum never would have accomplished that. Speaking of…

“Scrum’s roles, artifacts, events, and rules are immutable and although implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum. Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practices.”

The official scrum guide, http://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

Yeah, that sounds like a cult.

If I had my way, I’d take a new team of 4–6 devs and give them a general set of problems and let them work together for 2 months — just to experiment, become a team, be creative, learn the company’s tools, etc. Big tech wouldn’t like this much because that’s 2 months of salaries that weren’t billed out (and it’s possible nothing usable gets produced), and, of course, these people could just quit so the investment isn’t worth it. Well, devs don’t typically show up asking for at-will employment. Offer them contracts, invest in them, and build great teams …

Agile

If you’re just making something for someone else, agile+scrum may be fine. They give you the specs and you just need to build. But if you’re making a product internally, then Agile applies to everything — dev, marketing/sales, logistics, etc. And everything should be agile so that whatever you bring to market 6–1 trillion months later is current and competitive. Agile should include a giant feedback loop from the business side to the dev side to optimize product competitiveness once it ships.

Of course, you need a good team so that you don’t meander through the dev woods and then, through a roadmap committee, wind up deciding that Clippy is what Office really needed.[2] It takes experience to engage this well … but that’s what leadership is for…

Well, TrueAgile didn’t happen often at IBM. (Not sure if “TrueAgile” is a thing but the IBMer in me wants to trademark it and sell it on the consulting side to John Deere-like companies.) A collaborative feedback loop that fuels iteration and adaptation from all sides means you’ve got a shot at making something awesome over the course of the year.

Roadmap

I know everyone thinks they know what a product is … but sometimes what you have is just a collection of technologies looking for a purpose. When that happened at IBM, I’d ask for a roadmap. Then I’d get handed the dev map for the rest of the year. But that doesn’t answer the question “what is this going to be when it grows up?” We spent millions devving things that never answered that question. A roadmap isn’t about where you’ll be a few months from now but rather what is your destination?

And the salient question is not “what problem does it solve?” but rather “will people use it?” because if they will, then maybe they’ll buy it. People have all kinds of problems that they won’t pay anyone to solve or perhaps aren’t motivated enough to address. And really, if someone will use something, then you can make money off of it somehow. Engagement with the product is the foremost metric. The worst is when someone buys something and then doesn’t use it — hopefully you didn’t build a S/PaaS product…[3]

Business Justification

Big tech lacks the guts to sometimes say “I don’t know what the business justification is but maybe it’s a good idea — let’s do it.” What was the business justification for the iPod? There were dozens of cheap MP3 competitors. But ours is pretty and holds 5,000 songs. Was there a report that determined that people don’t have a place for their 5,000 songs? (No.) Of course, the iPod was launched to support iTunes, so what was the business justification of launching an appliance (e.g. hardware) to support a web platform that almost no one used? From a “business justification” perspective, the iPod looks like madness. Yeah, trillion dollar market cap madness.

Or what was the business justification for Microsoft spending something like $500 million on the xBox launch? Entirely new product, hardware that MS hated (because Gates is allergic to hardware), massive costs, and a platform for which MS had little software experience … Well that all seems insane. Yet it launched MS into hardware and once Ballmer left, MS really got their hardware mojo going. More trillion dollar market cap madness.

Now look at where Microsoft and Apple are today. It’s telling that a company that occasionally has the guts to say Leeeeeeroy Jenkins and the only required business justification is we might have a $1 trillion market cap some day instead of bullshitting people about A.I. and Quantum (shots fired).

Did Christopher Columbus have a business justification? Did NASA? No, they Leeeeeeroy Jenkins’d their way beyond the horizon.

Sometimes you just need to trust your engineers and business people to try new things. Some ships will sink and space shuttles will explode but that’s what it takes if you want to plant a flag on the moon.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

[3] So much more coming later on this…

About Nathan Allen

Formerly of Xio Research, an A.I. appliance company. Previously a strategy and development leader at IBM Watson Education. His views do not necessarily reflect anyone’s, including his own. (What.) Nathan’s academic training is in intellectual history; his next book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense….