Itamar Gilad: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, that sounds good. Let's talk about tasks and what you mean there. All right, awesome. So in many organizations there's these two worlds. There's the planning world where basically you have the managers, the stakeholders, some of the PMs really sit and think about what we need to launch and that's where we create the strategies and the roadmaps and the projects. But guess who is not invited to the party? The people who are actually doing the work. They live in Agile world, they're very focused on moving tickets to the done state, on completing burning story points, pushing stuff into production and there's a big gap between these two worlds. They don't understand each other, they don't see eye to eye, there's a lot of mistrust being built sometimes against the plans or the managers feels that the teams are just not being very effective. We've seen all of this and the solution, the stop gap is to put a PM in the middle. The PM is supposed to make all of this work, deliver on the roadmap like a project manager, feed the Agile machine with perfectly prioritized product backlogs and stories and it just doesn't work honestly. And the PMs I meet are very tired and they have to spend so much time in planifications and roadmap discussions and they're very busy, they don't have time to do research or to test ideas. So I suggest changing this and bringing the developers a little bit out of their Agile cage if you like and no disrespect to Agile, it's a great thing but let's let them do more than just develop. Let's let them discover as well and one of the tools I suggest and again this is a process is what I call the GIST board. So it's basically the top three layers of GIST. The goals are on the right, these are just the key results usually per team I suggest not more than four. So you create a GIST board per team, then the ideas we're working on right now sometimes with our ICE scores and then the next few steps that we might want to pursue in order to validate these ideas and this is a very dynamic thing. It changes all the time, the team leads need to update it and the team needs to meet around it at least once every other week to think to talk about what's going on. Are we still following the right ideas? How are we doing on the goals? What are the next steps? What's blocking us from completing the most important steps? And this is a discussion that is not happening today, because most of the discussion happens at the roadmap level and then there's a lot of discussion at the task level. But this middle layer of what actually are we trying to achieve and how well are we doing on it doesn't exist. If you do have this, you create a lot more context in the minds of your team and then they need to ask you fewer questions. You need to tell them less what to do. They know what's success and they are able to actually do a lot more on their own. Is the way to think about the GIST board as the way you should be road roadmapping or is this more of a strategy framework to think about why you should be prioritizing broadly?…

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