See Your Feedback Loops: The Secret Sauce to More & Effective Agility: EAG

Most leaders want organizational agility. They think that means the teams need to use a ticketing tool and do a lot of upfront planning. That planning will then allow the leaders to manage according to the plan.

But all that planning creates a lot of work in progress and multitasking—which looks a lot like a waterfall approach. The teams have so much work that they never quite finish. The teams roll over items from sprint to sprint and don’t fix defects when they first appear. The teams feel a ton of pressure and might even talk about “agile” death marches.

Everyone feels as if “agile” let them down.

No one has to work this way. Instead, we can review the various feedback loops and decide what to do next.
Any team—including managers—can create agility when they create and sustain short feedback loops. Short feedback loops are the secret sauce to real agility, regardless of what you call your approach.

Transcript

1. See Your Feedback Loops: The Keys to More & Effective Agility Johanna Rothman jr@jrothman.com www.jrothman.com https://linktr.ee/johannarothman
2. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Everyone’s gone “Agile,” right? 2
3. © 2025 Johanna Rothman What I See Instead of Double Loop Learning • Long and extensive backlogs and roadmaps • Teams become feature factories with little product strategy • Little to no experimentation • Lots of late changes • No joy. No ease. The grind of work. 3
4. © 2025 Johanna Rothman "Agile” Theater == Fake Agility 4
5. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Too few teams can deliver “fast” enough. Managers want more done now. 5
6. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Culture is the Root Cause 6 • Resource ef fi ciency thinking: Individual actions or deliverables • Flow ef fi ciency thinking: Create environment for everyone to succeed in teams • Rewards can drive your organizational structure
7. © 2025 Johanna Rothman When managers reward resource ef fi ciency, true agility cannot survive However, you have many options 7
8. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Assess various risks to incorporate agility into everything at all levels 8
9. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Part 1: Clarify Risks 9
10. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Risks Drive Choices for Feedback Loop Duration • Three major kinds of risks • Project risks • Product risks • Portfolio/organization risks • When we manage risks, we can reduce the duration of feedback loops and decide faster 10
11. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Project Risks Affect Lifecycle Choice • The project pyramid explains: • Drives your project (one aspect) • Constraints (not more than two) • Floats (the other three) 11
12. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Product Risks Affect Lifecycle Choice • Product risks clarify how much innovation you need and when • Very few product ideas survive customer contact 12
13. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Portfolio Risks Affect Lifecycle Choice • How often does your organization need to re-decide on the project portfolio? • More change -> More frequent decisions • Insuf fi cient stability for long decision durations • The more portfolio risks, the shorter the feedback loops need to be 13
14. © 2025 Johanna Rothman More risks? Reduce feedback loop duration 14
15. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Poll for Your Collaboration to Enable Agility • In the chat, please use a number for your answer: 15
16. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Part 2: Clarify Lifecycles 16
17. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Serial Lifecycles • Waterfall • Stage-Gate • Phases • Characteristics: • Plan a lot up front • SMOE (Simple Matter of Execution) 17
18. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Reality for Too Many “Agile” Teams 18 Requirements Hell (When your roadmap has no experiments & extends past 30 days) Freezes are Slush (Agile approaches do not need freezes) Reality: Unplanned Feedback Loops
19. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Iterative Lifecycles • Re fi ne prototypes: • Boehm’s Spiral Model • Evolutionary Prototyping • Even SAFe, unless the teams release from the fi rst timebox 19
20. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Internal vs External Feedback • Iterative approaches can work under these conditions: • Obtain feedback from outside the team • Obtain feedback from a customer • The longer it takes for customer- based feedback, the more likely the project “Kiss of Death” 20
21. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Incremental Lifecycles • Design to Schedule focuses on release candidates • Staged Delivery assumes the team will release 21
22. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Late Feedback in Incremental Lifecycles • Design to schedule has risks because everything is a release candidate • In Staged Delivery, release what you have 22
23. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Consider Combining Approaches 23 Date-driven: Iterative fi rst, then Incremental Feature-driven: Iterative fi rst, then choose when to release
24. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Clarify Agility 24
25. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Agile Approaches Require: • A collaborative cross-functional team • Limits and Ranks WIP (1, 2, 3, not high, medium, low) • Releases often for feedback • Learns from what they did • Consider “Agility” instead of “Agile” 25
26. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Agile Approaches are Not Lifecycles • A culture change • Not a mindset or speci fi c practices • De fi nitely not a speci fi c framework or method • Can change as the team or organization needs different outcomes • Lifecycles are speci fi c approaches • They tend not to change as the team proceeds 26
27. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Agile Teams Work Through the Architecture to Deliver 27
28. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Component Teams Challenge Agility 28
29. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Agile Approaches 29 Iterations are timeboxes. That’s how the team limits its WIP. The shorter the iteration, the faster everyone learns. By de fi nition, the work is done at the end of the timebox. A Kanban system does not need timeboxes. The team limits its WIP by design. I like to right-size the work so the team delivers on a cadence.
30. © 2025 Johanna Rothman How to Choose a Lifecycle (Not “Agile”) • Higher organizational or product risks: incremental, combination, or agile approach • Project risks: • Date → incremental or agile approach • Low defects → incremental or agile approach • More features → iterative or agile approach • General guidelines • Know what to do and 2-3 weeks? → serial or incremental because you don’t need to learn much • Longer timeframe? Anything other than serial 30
31. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Longer Timeframe Requires Adaptability in Everything: Backlog, Roadmap, Strategy 31
32. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Poll for Your WIP Limits to Enable Agility • In the chat, please use a number for your answer: 32
33. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Part 3: How to Increase Agility 33
34. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Team Tips to Increase Agility • Collaborate on fewer things: • One team, not multitasked individuals • Watch the work, not the people • Consider value stream mapping to see your collaboration vs cooperation • Hudson Bay Start instead of up-front planning 34
35. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Flow Metrics Support More Agility • Velocity is meaningless: measure cycle time • Aging to see where work gets stuck and for how long • WIP: How much work is in progress • Throughput: How often does the team release something? • Flow metrics are your reality and explain collaboration and WIP 35 Little’s Law:
36. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Culture/Project Tips to Increase Agility • Focus on all the ways you can learn faster: • Internal feedback (demos) • Customer feedback • Retrospectives on the work and product • Plan for shorter projects to reduce unplanned feedback loops • Deliver & Demo something at least once a month. Then, once a week. Then once a day. Then, multiple times per day. 36
37. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Less Planning + More Delivering = Real Agility 37
38. © 2025 Johanna Rothman How Can You Instill Real Agility? • “Agile” is not the point—often leads to fake agility • Instead, how fast can you: • Satisfy the customer with working product to obtain revenue • Requires collaboration and risk evaluation • Incorporate agility to bring joy and ease to your work 38
39. © 2025 Johanna Rothman All My Books (Organized) 39 Product Development Management Personal Development
40. © 2025 Johanna Rothman Let’s Stay in Touch • Pragmatic Manager: www.jrothman.com/pragmaticmanager • Please link with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/ in/johannarothman/ • Project Lifecycles: https://www.jrothman.com/lifecyclebook • See the value stream maps in Measure Cycle Time, Not Velocity: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2019/09/measure- cycle-time-not-velocity/ • Hudson Bay Start: https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2025/01/ how-to-conduct-an-agile-hudson-bay-start-to-test-how- your-team-works/ • Flow metrics newsletter: https://www.jrothman.com/ newsletter/2024/01/ fl ow-metrics-and-why-they-matter-to- teams-and-managers/ • https://linktr.ee/johannarothman 40