Building products by using agile principles is an effective way to grow a business. There are plenty of frameworks helping us to structure our development processes this way. But all too often, we tend to focus on merely producing more output (aka features) more quickly. We forget to consider the actual impact our products need to have in our user’s behavior. Therefore, we need an agile goal-setting system like Objectives and Key Results (OKR). Not only do they help product teams to focus on outcome over output, but they also enable true autonomy for them to build the best solutions.
About the Workshop
Date&Location: 27. November 2019 – Startplatz, Cologne
Trainer: Sonja Mewes & Tim Herbig
Language: English
This workshop is part of our Pre-Conference Workshop Day for Digitale Leute Summit 2019.
Join Tim and Sonja for a practical full-day workshop experience to learn
- why thinking in impacts can drastically change your perspective on product development,
- what effective OKRs are made of and how to use them for setting your team up for working on outcomes instead of features,
- how to set up your agile product development processes to support thinking and working in outcomes tomorrow,
- how to incorporate OKR into your agile product processes throughout all levels.
The workshop will not only dedicate plenty of time for practical exercises but also for answering questions resulting from the participant’s unique situation.
Input and exercises include:
- Learning about proven tactics from our own first-hand experiences
- The concept of OKR as a learning system with a unique setup per company
- Comparing OKR sets with and without outcome-orientation
- Apply methods on how to adjust your OKRs towards higher reasons instead of misusing it for task management
- Understanding the concept of theme-based roadmaps and how to combine quarterly goal setting with continuous Product Discovery
- Work through the process of combining OKRs with agile routines and processes like roadmap and sprint plannings.
- Group exercise: Design the individual processes together with other attendees.
What do participants receive?
- Course slides
- Industry best practices
- Free templates to improve your OKR processes
- Draft for your individual combined process
- Confirmation of participation
Who should attend?
Primary audience: Product Managers, Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches who need to solve challenges between OKR and product processes after a company-wide OKR implementation
Secondary audience: Executives who are looking to align the product organization with overall strategic company goals
About Sonja & Tim
Sonja is founder and consultant for digital strategy and OKRs at Beautiful Future. She accompanies organizations in the agency and software industry during their implementation and development of individual OKR systems. Sonja fell in love with OKR after over fifteen years of traditional management experiences, that strongly triggered the relevance for new ways of more meaningful working environments. As co-host of the OKR Forum Hamburg, she discusses those opportunities through OKRs and other innovative working tools with an inspiring community.
Tim is an experienced product leader, speaker, and author of the book ‘Lateral Leadership: A Practical Guide for Agile Product Managers.’ He previously held product roles in companies such as XING, Gruner+Jahr, and multiple startups. He believes in the creation of autonomy through alignment to enable product teams to thrive for the best possible solution instead of working through feature lists. In addition to his devotion to enabling companies to build better teams and products, he’s also the co-organizer of the Product Tank Hamburg meetup series. Last but not least, he is a regular host of our podcast series Digitale Leute Insights.
About Startplatz
STARTPLATZ is a startup incubator and accelerator with branches in Cologne and Düsseldorf and functions as a hub for the local founders’ scene. It was founded in 2012 by Dr. Lorenz Gräf and Matthias Gräf. On approximately 4.500 square meters in Cologne Mediapark and 1.900 square meters in Düsseldorf’s MedienHafen, an ecosystem was created that offers aspiring startups and innovative companies space for growth, advice & coaching, workshops & events as well as a connection to the large network. More than 200 startups have already worked on their business ideas, over 20 million euros have been invested in them, and more than 135 teams participated in the accelerator program. In cooperation with partners from the ecosystem, STARTPLATZ also offers companies and medium-sized enterprises various solutions from the startup world to successfully implement and promote digitization and innovation processes. Visit www.startplatz.de for more information.
Links to All Pre-Conference Workshops:
- Product Discovery Essentials
- OKRs in Agile Product Development
- Domain-Driven Design
- Rapid Prototyping
- Design Sprints on Steroids
- Beyond Agile: Build Better Products
- Product Owner Workshop
- Bridging the Gap – Using Design Thinking and Agile to Build Better Products
- AI Envisioning: How to find and describe valuable AI solutions to improve your business!