Challenging the Sprint - An Interview with John Cutler

John Cutler describes himself as a Product Development Nut. He’s deeply focused on Product Development with a Lean /Agile approach and finding ways to improve how we work. He posts his thoughts in Medium, and although he says he is not a professional blogger, he generates new content about twice a week. I really enjoy reading his posts because they always challenge me and push me into seeing things through a different perspective. A few weeks ago John posted an article called “Flow, Decoupling Cadences and Fixed Sprint Lengths” (https://hackernoon.com/flow-decoupling-cadences-and-fixed-length-sprints-3eac1428ad73) in which he challenged the idea of Sprint time boxes. (There is a video version (https://vimeo.com/248376811) if you’d rather watch that ). The article was thought provoking and left me with a number of questions. So I reached out to John and he was kind enough to let me pester him with my questions in a podcast. Show Notes 00:08 Interview Begins 00:50 Some background on John 04:31 Lessons John learned as a touring musician that help him work with teams and build new products 07:46 Intentionally disrupting your flow in order to grow and learn 08:47 Introduction of the main topic - Flow, Decoupling Cadences and Fixed Length Sprints 11:48 Understand they why behind the practices you are applying and figuring out how to make them work for you 13:30 What job do we hire the Sprint for? If you don’t know why you are using these time boxes, they may not be helping 19:47 If you are failing Sprints, is it about the length of the Sprint or the size of the work? Get ridiculously uncomfortable. 22:09 When you can’t get through it, go slower and do less. Blazing away at tempo is not going to help anyone 23:29 Why brand new teams should start by going slower and doing less 25:17 Is it that Scrum doesn’t work, or that people aren’t doing it right? 30:02 Be intentional and understand why you are employing practices, and then figure out how you’ll know if they work 32:27 What is your company hiring Agile to do? 33:42 Know your audience 38:00 Filling your Product Backlog with goals instead of features 41:18 Visualizing dependencies in your backlog - WITH STRING! 51:55 How to reach John 52:36 John’s upcoming events and deliverables 54:31 John’s writing process 55:40 Podcast Ends Links from the Podcast John's post “Flow, Decoupling Cadences and Fixed Sprint Lengths” http://bit.ly/2mNekgR LeanAgile US (February 26-28) http://leanagileus.com FlowState (application) http://hailoverman.com/flowstate Contacting John Twitter https://twitter.com/johncutlefish Medium http://bit.ly/2rkYkrL