Why This Course

While we find no shortage of people who have great product visions, we seem to struggle with building up a series of small steps that realize those product visions. This course teaches how to gather, analyze, validate and build complex products that teams love to build, and WOW customers.

Abstract

Stories and Use Cases are close cousins but each has a distinct strength. How do we balance the tension between performing complex analysis and understanding what users want, while driving the team in small increments of work? 

Use Cases are and continue to be one of the best techniques we have for performing analysis from a functional point of view. In other words, Use Cases capture the “use of the product”. Well written Use Cases help us by decomposing complex product requirements and tracking all the little moving parts. By organizing the connections between requirements with Use Cases we get a broad view of our product’s potential and how it can evolve. One of the most influential books on this topic is Alistair Cockburn’s, Writing Effective Use Cases. Use Cases  are a great technique that allows us to understand and create very large amounts of complex, interconnected and coherent logic.

User Stories and generally Storyotypes have also gained popularity with agile teams. Stories focus on being simple, buildable, and validatable pieces of the product. By looking for the edges of each piece, we can create sharp definitions of “done.” This makes managing the work easier. When it comes to driving the team forward “one bite at a time”, stories are the favored technique for agile teams. We are able to change the direction of the team rapidly and not over commit, by managing small pieces of work at a time. Most teams stall out when the work is not properly broken down and managed.

This Course Covers

• What a great Use Case looks like
• How and when to unfold stories from a Use Case
• What makes great stories, user stories and how to manage the work
• How and when to decompose stories into tasks using the planning game
• Creating sharp definitions of “done” for all the work we do
• How and when to validate the “right product”
• Special topics: Scaling Teams, Tools, Non-collocation, Testing, and Skill deficits
• Why avoiding and eliminating waste is tightly coupled to an agile analysis
• Why the success of our products is strongly influenced by our analysis
• How leveraging the power of emergence evolves Great Products that WOW!
• The importance of involved prioritization to maintain focus
• Agile development’s best practices
• Daily retrospection to pull out key concepts and lessons learned

Who would benefit? 

Product Owner, Business Analyst, Software Analyst, QA, Testers, ScrumMaster, Process Advocate, Project Manager, Software Developers, Architects and anyone else involved in product development, especially software product development. Sometimes these roles are categorized by responsibilities such as requirements capture, design, gathering, refining, business decomposition, requirements trace or development. In summary, those who require strong skills in systematizing complex logic, communicating and building products.