The Agile Coach's Guide To The Galaxy

  • Product Management

    A stakeholder, user, and customer walk into a bar… but what do they order?

    Stakeholders, users, and customers are three distinct roles. Many workplaces that I have been to have used the words stakeholder, user, and customer as if they had the same meaning. I get confused when someone uses the three words interchangeably because they are very different, and for a reason. The purpose of this article is to share my view of the differences between the three roles. To do this, let’s meet Mark, Lloyd, Roger, and Phil from Healthstudio, a private healthcare company that is well known for its outstanding customer service. Meet Mark, the manager for Healthstudio’s call center. At Healthstudio Mark leads the call center that handles everything from…

  • Product Management

    What’s the difference between a user story and a use case?

    User stories and Use cases have the same intention. Many years ago I was at a restaurant in Bombay together with two colleagues, Anup and Rama. We were seated outside and waiting for our food. It was windy and on our table was a stack of napkins that almost blew away. Anup flipped the stack hoping that the napkins would not blow away but as the wind kept on blowing the napkins kept on almost blowing away. Over the next couple of minutes Anup would turn the stack of napkins over from one side to the other several times. Finally Rama took a glass and put it on top of…

  • Coaching Teams

    Agile @ Spotify – behind the scenes

    A few days ago Martin Wasielewski, an Agile coach at Spotify, and I presented our perspective of  how agile we, Spotify, actually are. We interviewed each others on stage at “Agila Sverige 2014” and the questions we answered were “What surprised you when you first joined Spotify?”, “How agile do you think we are?”, and “What is it like in reality having autonomous teams?”. Unfortunately the interview is in Swedish since the conference is an annual swedish conference. If there is interest we will caption the video to English.