How do you go from backlog grooming to blockbuster results with agile? Hypothesis-driven decisions. Specifically, you need to make sure that your team is investing its time and energy in something where everyone knows what constitutes success. Most people and most teams aren’t used to working this way, and this week we’ll focus on how you get started in a practical way.

Nothing will help a team deliver better outcomes like making sure they’re building something the user values. This might sound simple or obvious, but I think after this week it’s likely you’ll find opportunities to help improve your team’s focus by testing ideas more definitively before you invest in developing software. In this module you’ll learn how to make concept testing an integral part of your product pipeline. We’ll continue to apply methods from Lean Startup, looking at how they pair with agile. We’ll look at how high-functioning teams design and run situation-appropriate experiments to test ideas, and how that works before the fact (when you’re testing an idea) and after the fact (when you’re testing the value of software you’ve released).

The best products are tested for usability early and often, avoiding the destructive stress and uncertainty of a ‘big unveil’. In this module, you’ll learn how to diagnose, design and execute phase-appropriate user testing. The tools you’ll learn to use here (a test plan template, prototyping tool, and test session infrastructure) are accessible/teachable to anyone on your team. And that’s a very good thing- often products are released with poor usability because there ‘wasn’t enough time’ to test it. With these techniques, you’ll be able to test early and often, reinforcing your culture of experimentation.