The Liquid Agility Framework: Toolkit for Product Leaders
Agile Methods like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe provide strong guidance on engineering, team management, and productivity…but what about product management? Most agile methods have little to say about how exactly roles like the Product Owner should go about evaluating, ordering, or refining work and nothing about how to assess the impacts post-delivery and drive an effective feedback loop. Building the wrong thing quickly is of little value. Arlen introduces a set of robust but simple tools, some unique and others extensions of existing approaches, meant to “fill in the blanks” of most agile methods, especially where the Product Owner role is concerned. The Liquid Agility framework ties these tools into an easily comprehensible flow that can aid product leaders in more wisely managing their portfolio of work and backlogs. Liquid Agility consists of four activities: Prioritize, Prepare, Deliver, and Qualify. Prioritize – Features are ordered using the SIP framework and JUICE prioritization method. Prepare – Features are refined with the FLUID framework. Deliver – Teams execute together using PURE. Qualify – Release, product feedback, and management decisions post-delivery are guided by the DRIP framework. You’ll leave this workshop with an immediately applicable set of ideas and techniques that you largely won’t find anywhere else, presented in a highly accessible and visually appealing canvas that participants will receive as part of the session. We will use the tools across a variety of use cases to show their applicability across different domains. Join us and dive into Liquid Agility!
Arlen Bankston was at the vanguard of the agile movement, beginning to practice within two years of the Agile Manifesto’s writing. He was among the first to explicitly blend lean systems thinking and user experience practices with agile software development practices. Arlen was one of the earliest Certified Scrum Trainers, exploring Lean, Six Sigma, BPM, and other process management and systems thinking approaches to ensure that organizations took a holistic perspective beyond just the software. He became a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt while leading a Lean-Agile practice for six years, and was a successful entrepreneur helping to lead the consultancy LitheSpeed for fifteen years following. Now he has formed the company Adaptagility LLC and is working in concert with Grow-Lean LLC. Today, Arlen works across every industry and enjoys a reputation as a thought leader and a dynamic, entertaining, and practical trainer and presenter. He has trained and mentored thousands of ScrumMasters, Product Owners, team members, and executives. Arlen wrote the book “HR and the Agile Organization” to describe how human resources departments can adapt to better support organizations that are trying to become more adaptive while improving employee engagement and retention along the way.