101 techniques for product discovery and delivery in Scrum

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Wait? What? Did I read that right? One hundred and one techniques? Sounds like a lot. Are you sure?

Scrum, as we know, is a framework for iterative and incremental feedback-driven product development. A framework provides only the bare bones within which we can follow a number of different practices to achieve the same ends.

As Scrum does not tie itself to any specific methodology of product development, any explanation of Scrum risks sounding overly theoretical or academic. To avoid this, I made sure that Scrum in easy steps includes specific examples of what teams can do as they work their way through discovering, defining, developing, and delivering the product.

These techniques range from simple patterns for how to understand or interpret something, through to specific hands-on exercises and practical techniques.

OK, so prove it!

By the book (no pun intended), I will list them out chapter by chapter.

Introducing Scrum

  1. Shu-Ha-Ri
  2. Gartner’s pace-layered application strategy
  3. Snowden’s Cynefin framework

Forming a scrum team

  1. Product owner overlay on product management capabilities
  2. T-shaped people
  3. Working agreements
  4. Talking stick

Discovering what customers need

  1. Design thinking
  2. Discovery workshops
  3. Discovery and delivery in parallel (infinite loop)
  4. Design sprints / Sprint 0
  5. Metaphor / screen-writer’s pitch
  6. Vision statement / elevator pitch
  7. Vision board
  8. Value proposition canvas
  9. Product vision box
  10. Customer personas
  11. Impact mapping

Defining the product backlog

  1. Definition of ready
  2. Backlog refinement
  3. User story / 3Cs
  4. Backlog decomposition (epics, features, and stories)
  5. INVEST technique
  6. Acceptance criteria
  7. Specification by example
  8. Gherkin
  9. Discovery board
  10. Workflows
  11. Customer experience journey mapping
  12. Use cases
  13. Story boards
  14. Story mapping
  15. Uncovering work with patterns
  16. Splitting work with workflow patterns
  17. Splitting work with complexity patterns
  18. Splitting work with deferral patterns
  19. Splitting work with prioritisation patterns

Prioritising and sizing the backlog

  1. Planning onion
  2. Product roadmap
  3. Minimum viable product (MVP) and minimum loveable product
  4. MoSCoW
  5. Minimum marketable features (MMF)
  6. Sizing (story points and t-shirts)
  7. Bockman technique (sizing by affinity)
  8. Business value game
  9. Highest paid person’s opinion (HiPPO)
  10. Cost of delay
  11. First in first out (FIFO)
  12. Weighted shortest job first (WSJF)
  13. Release planning
  14. Sprint map

Preparing for the sprint

  1. Definition of done
  2. Velocity-based planning
  3. Planning poker
  4. Spikes
  5. Capacity-based planning
  6. SMART tasks
  7. Scrum board

A day in the life of a sprint

  1. Test driven development (TDD), plus variants acceptance test driven development (ATDD) and  behaviour driven development (BDD)
  2. Refactoring
  3. Pair programming
  4. Sprint burn-down
  5. Daily scrum
  6. Swarming
  7. Triaging defects and incidents
  8. Technical debt
  9. Aged defect analysis
  10. The RIDA card
  11. Risk management

Delivering the product increment

  1. Stabilisation and hardening sprints
  2. Continual integration / continual deployment
  3. DevOps
  4. Sprint review
  5. done, Done, DONE
  6. Release burn-up
  7. Risk board
  8. RIDA radar
  9. Risk burn-down

Continual improvement in Scrum

  1. Prime directive
  2. Mood lines
  3. Safety check
  4. Explorer, shopper, vacationer, prisoner
  5. Untangle
  6. Mob rock, paper, scissors
  7. Candy love
  8. Stop, start, continue (variations:  liked, learned, lacked; KALM–keep, add, less, more; WWW–worked well, kinda worked, didn’t work)
  9. Open the box
  10. Sail boat
  11. Affinity grouping
  12. Dot voting
  13. Five whys
  14. Ishikawa (fishbone) diagram
  15. Focus process (theory of constraints)
  16. Advocacy styles (Moreira’s model)
  17. Lean change framework
  18. Transformation roadmap

Scaling Scrum beyond one team

  1. Scrum of scrums
  2. Lean governance
  3. Large scale scrum (LeSS)
  4. Scaled professional scrum (Nexus)
  5. Scaled agile framework (SAFe)

Closing

So that was 101 techniques, ranging from patterns and models through to practical exercises and hands-on techniques.

Were there any I missed? Do you disagree with any of these? I would love to hear what you think? Leave a comment below. 

2 thoughts on “101 techniques for product discovery and delivery in Scrum”

  1. Vinay

    Hello David,

    The blog was very informative and helpful to look at 101 ways to adopt Agile Delivery,

    one thing that I am trying to know is RIDA cards, RIDA radar? What exactly are those ?

    Reply
    1. David Morris

      RIDA is an acronym for Risk, Impediment, Dependency, and Assumption. It is sometimes also known as RAID.

    2. The RIDA card is a way of documenting that you have identified a Risk, Impediment, Dependency, or Assumption; your assessment of it’s impact and likelihood, who has taken ownership of monitoring/managing it, and ultimately what you chose to do: Resolve it, Mitigate the impact, or just Accept it.
    3. The RIDA radar, on the other hand, is a board to view all RIDA cards together, possibly arranging them state, team, platform, etc. etc. It is sometimes also known as ROAM board (due to the states of Resolved, Owned, Accepted, and Mitigated) or more simply Risk board.
      4. Reply

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