Dual Track Scrum Tools and Techniques

To continue on Dual Track Scrum (DTS), please note at this juncture, I have not put any of these steps fully in practice and so they are purely from a theoretical perspective, although I am aware that DTS pundits such as Aaron Sanders has implemented these tools and techniques within multiple organizations.

To recap, Dual Track Scrum provides an expanded Agile framework for Product discovery that aligns with Product delivery.  This expands on the rather thin structure around backlog grooming and story boarding thus putting more effort and rigor into that process to continuously validate the right solution is being development.

Remember the tenants of discovery are building valuable, usable and feasible solutions.

There are several tools and techniques available with DTS and will cover the overall current state approach with the opportunity canvas.

The opportunity canvas brings detailed clarity of the current product landscape, in an effort to better define what features are the most important in any given solution.  They include:

• Documenting any assumptions that would be a product killer if proven false.  Be very open and honest on determining these and can be as simple as “Google releases a similar product”.
• A clear description of the problems the solution is addressing as well as the solution description itself.  This should be high level from an end user perspective as part of a product theme that is frequently tweaked.
• Describe the users and customers that currently experience the problem.  Who are they?  What is an example persona?  How much does it impact them?
• How these problems are addressed today?  There is always an existing process and there are usually more than one.  What are they and how much time / effort do they take?
• How this solution will provide the users new value/improvements?  Time savings?  Cost savings?  Entertainment?  What else?
• How to measure whether and how much the users would adopt this solution.  Look at what metrics will make a difference in knowing the predicted adoption rates.
• Determine the adoption strategy to bring the most users on board.  This should be based on the previous opportunity backlog answers to derive the best strategy.
• Determine any business problems in building and delivering this solution.  Find out the challenges with delivery, marketing, sales, support, etc. with the solution.
• Identify and measure any changes in business performance metrics for releasing this solution.  Your business will change with the release of this solution and therefore the measurement of success must factor in this solution.
• The budget must always be considered on how much can be built for a Minimum Viable Product and when revenue must come in to continue building and expanding the product.

I will cover further tools and techniques in my next blog.  A big “hats off” to Aaron Sanders for much of this material.