Jira apps for agile teams

How well do you know your customers?

🧐 Well, you know they use your product…

🧑‍💻 You sometimes write user stories for them, but not based an any particular persona…

🕵️ You did talk to a customer once; it was interesting, but now you aren’t sure where those notes went…

So that you can provide value to your customers, you really do need to get to know them well. What are the goals, motivations, and pain points that bring them to your product?

This is pretty important stuff, so let’s take a look at 7 reasons why it’s good to have a healthy level of customer obsession in your agile teams...

1. Agile and customer value go hand-in-hand

Agile is all about the customer. At least, it should be.

It’s right there in the first two agile principles:

(1) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

(2) Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Manifesto For Agile Software Development

If you want to take an agile approach, you’ll definitely be putting your users at the heart of your development.

2. Each sprint should deliver a better product, and more value, for your customers

One reason why agile should (in theory - we’ll expand on this shortly) benefit your customers is that every two to four weeks, you’ll ship something new. It may not be a whole new feature each time, but every update, UI improvement, and even every bug fix is delivery of incremental improvement.

This is kind of a big deal when you compare it to traditional project management approaches.

With a waterfall approach, customers could be waiting months or even years before seeing any changes. In many cases, by the time updates were released, customers, technologies, and requirements had moved on.

But by taking an agile approach, you:

• Consider and incorporate user requested updates, features, and changes at any time
• Regularly add new features to a roadmap and incrementally roll them out in weeks or months, rather than years
• Can see early on if something’s not working, because you invite your users to report issues and provide feedback right away
• Show your users how the product is developing and growing
• Keep your product moving forward, and the customer is moving forward with it
• Grow the value your product provides to your customers over time.

However, it’s important to note that all of these really awesome benefits only apply if you’re prioritising your backlog and choosing features with your customers’ best interests at heart.

3. Agile teams need to know what’s valuable to their customers

“There is a chasm between the output of a team and successful outcomes for their customers. And the success of a team is measured by outcomes, not code.”

Nick Muldoon, CEO and Co-Founder, Easy Agile

Your customers have their own priorities, and they won’t align with the priorities of your business unless you make your customers the primary concern of your business.

Your developers likely want to work on projects that they find exciting or fulfilling, so the best way to motivate your agile teams is by building empathy with the people they’re building for. The most successful teams get a kick out of delivering the features that matter most to their customers. Because if you’re not solving their most important problems, your customers will find someone else who will solve them.

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4. Customer focus leads to better quality products

When you’re obsessed with your customers, you deliver products that actually matter.

Your whole business, from leadership, to engineering, to HR and Marketing; all need to stay focussed on the people that your business is aiming to attract. When your development teams understand your customers and develop with them in mind, there’s a much better chance that they’ll build the right things at the right time for the right people. And this is critical to the success of your product and organisation.

It’s also a great way to avoid building bloated products with unnecessary features.

5. An agile customer focus is better for planning and prioritising

The worst backlogs are huge ‘to-do’ lists; task focussed and likely to be out of date. The best backlogs however, align with the customer journey, are informed by feedback from your customers, and attempt to tackle their greatest pain points.

Without a solid understanding of your customers to inform your backlog, you could end up planning sprints, versions or even entire increments that don’t deliver anything useful or move the product forward for users. And that’s a pretty costly risk.

6. Customer feedback makes agile teams better

Teams who are obsessed with customers love getting customer feedback, whether it’s via customer interviews, surveys or just having a chat about their experience.

Customer feedback is incredibly powerful because it can help you:

• Understand your customers - Know what their biggest problems are and what they care about most
• Motivate your agile team - Help your team understand the problems they’re solving, the difference they’re making, and that their work is meaningful
• Spot trends and patterns - Ensure your product adapts to what’s in demand right now and what your customers will need in the future
• Make better products - Find out what’s not working so you can fix it
• Track your progress - See whether customers are happier with your product over time
• Stay relevant - Because products and companies that solve problems stick around long-term
• Get buy in - When your customers are involved in the process, they’ll feel more committed to the product, which can reduce churn
• Improve retention - Reduce churn and keep your customers for longer when you incorporate their feedback and ideas into your product
• Make data-informed decisions - Stop relying on your assumptions and let the data drive your strategy

So customer feedback is obviously awesome, but what do you actually DO with it? How do you share it with the team and turn it into actions? Well, that’s where user story mapping comes in.

7. Agile user story mapping is all about the customer

Most agile teams run user story mapping sessions to discuss what functions and features are needed in the product. User stories maps are a visual tool for customer focused development, ensuring your customer journey stays front and center throughout development.

This is where customer feedback comes into play. When your team can access a wealth of feedback from users, they can write user stories informed by real data. This gives them a much better chance of prioritizing features that will add value to users right away. Faster time-to-value. Sounds great right?

This makes backlog prioritization and sprint or version planning so much simpler, because the whole team shares a picture of what is important to the people who use what they are building. The team knows what they should prioritise next.

Improving your customer-focus is a solid strategy.

If your team isn’t exactly obsessed with your customers, maybe it’s time to change that?

Because if you’re focusing on your customers, you’ll make more of the right decisions about what products, features, and requirements you need to work on. You may not get it right every time, but if you’re involving your customers, you’ll soon learn what doesn’t work. Your team will find it easier to make decisions, you’ll waste less time, and you’ll build a better product, that keeps getting better.

Win win.

At Easy Agile, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our products, and one of the ways we foster innovation is through Dash Days—a focused period where our team steps away from daily tasks to experiment, explore, and reimagine how our tools can better serve customers.

During our most recent Dash Days, we took a fresh look at the user interface of two of our flagship products, Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs. The goal was to enhance interaction and discoverability, so users can experience the full value of our tools without unnecessary complexity.

Here’s a glimpse into our thought process, challenges, and the exciting solutions we explored.

The challenge

As Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs have evolved, we’ve introduced powerful features designed to give users more control and flexibility. However, as new capabilities have been added, the interface has become more elaborate. For us, this presents an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back, simplify the experience, and help users unlock more of what our products offer.

To address this, we brought people from across the business together to brainstorm how we could improve the experience in both products. Through these sessions, we identified a few core opportunities:

• Discoverability: How do we make it easier for users to find and use the powerful features built into our tools?
• Visibility: What’s the best way to surface the right information and features when users need them? 
• Consistency: How do we create a more uniform experience within and across our products to make navigation intuitive?

Armed with these insights, we then set out to explore solutions tailored to each product’s unique challenges. 

A more personalized experience with Easy Agile Programs

For Programs, we focused on three “how might we” questions to reframe our challenges into opportunities: 

1. How might we create more focus on the actions users are trying to complete?
2. How might we make navigation more intuitive and easy?
3. How might we help users with more context about where they are in the app at any given screen? 

Out of the many solutions we explored, the one that got us the most excited was the idea of an Easy Agile Programs Home Screen—a personalized dashboard designed to guide users based on where they are in their planning cycle. 

This home screen could adapt based on where users are in their journey, offering relevant guidance and actions.

• For new users, the home screen could provide clear onboarding steps and easy access to help, so they can get started quickly and confidently.
• For experienced users, it could offer insights and key actions related to their progress, so they can stay focused on what matters most. Users might even see data summarizing their accomplishments, which makes it easier to share successes with their teams.

Whether someone’s brand new to the product or deep into execution, the home screen could be a great way to guide and coach our users—helping them answer questions like, "What should I be doing next?" or "What extra value am I missing out on?". 

A more focused interface for Easy Agile TeamRhythm

For TeamRhythym, our three key “how might we” questions were:

• How might we provide more focus within the User Story Map during sprint planning?
• How might we improve the discoverability of issues without epics?
• How might we enhance the layout to highlight key features and improve overall usability? 

With these questions in mind, we explored a range of ideas to simplify sprint planning and make it easier for users to prep, plan, and review their work, whether they’re using Scrum or Kanban.

Sprint planning can sometimes feel overwhelming when you have multiple sprints competing for attention. To help users focus, so we explored the idea of introducing a focused view during sprint planning. 

• This would allow users to zoom in on a specific sprint and the backlog alone, while collapsing others. 
• Each issue would have its own row in the detailed view, and users can drag and drop either an entire row or drag individual issues to quickly rank them based on priorities.
• The sprint view will also hide epics that don’t have linked issues in the current sprint, giving users a cleaner view of what’s relevant to their current work.

We also looked at ways to enhance the User Story Map interface to bring the most useful tools and features to the forefront. By improving how key functionality is presented, we’re helping teams quickly access what they need, when they need it, enabling them to stay productive without interruption.

This way, we can create a smoother, more focused experience for teams using TeamRhythm, so they can focus on what’s in front of them without being distracted by everything else.

Your turn. What do you think?

At Easy Agile, we’re always thinking about what comes next. 

These ideas aren’t on our official roadmap just yet, but they’re the kind of innovations we’re excited to explore.

If you think these changes would improve your experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs, let us know! Your feedback helps us decide what to prioritize, so we can continue building tools that truly make a difference for your teams.

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Your company has finally committed to practicing Scrum. WOOT!! 🎉 The promised land is laid out before you — self-organizing teams, sustainable delivery pace, and autonomy to do the right thing for the product and the team. You can't wait to get started! (Spoiler alert: There's an agile release train in your future.)

That was three months ago. Today, your product development organization is a hot mess. Teams are delivering the wrong work at the right time. Code is stuck on a shelf waiting for another team to deliver a dependency. And upper management is thinking about pulling the plug and going back to the older waterfall days.

If you work in a large organization with 50+ software developers and engineers, Scrum can be a tough nut to crack. The larger the organization, the more likely you'll have cross-team dependencies, scheduling conflicts, and challenges creating transparency between the business, product, and engineering teams. But fear not...

SAFe to the rescue! SAFe is short for scaled agile framework. Intended to help large companies implement Scrum, SAFe provides a framework for coordinating work across many Scrum teams.

Part of the SAFe framework is the concept of an agile release train (ART). If you're not familiar with ARTs, you're in the right place. We'll explain what an ART is, why it helps large companies deliver software solutions more efficiently, and how you can start an ART at your company.

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So, what is an agile release train?

First, let's explain the train metaphor. A train goes down the tracks intending to reach a specific destination. Along the way, the train may stop at multiple depots and add new cargo or passengers. Your software solution is the train tracks. Team contributions to that solution are the new cargo you pick up at the depots. And, the destination is the business value delivered to your users. Simple enough, huh?

ARTs help a group of teams stay aligned on the business purpose of their work and coordinate the delivery of solutions. Your teams are probably organized by function or value stream. An ART identifies the input and timing of each team's contributions that help achieve the business objective for the value stream. Think of it as cross-functional coordination on steroids.

Here are some basic requirements for an ART:

• The schedule is fixed so the scope is variable. But don't panic — once your teams have a consistent velocity, confidence in the scope will increase.
• All teams must be on the same sprint and release cadence.
• Each team follows the values and principles in the Agile Manifesto.
• ARTs participate in planning events for program increments (PIs) and inspect and adapt (I&A) ceremonies, which are similar to retrospectives and system demos.
• Innovation and planning (IP) iterations must be regularly scheduled between program increments. This provides your large team of individual agile teams time to innovate, update infrastructure, or indulge in some specialized training or a hot tech conference. IP iterations also offer a nice buffer in case your PI gets behind schedule.

If your organization is large enough, you may need multiple agile release trains focused on independent value streams. If that's the case, you may need an additional level of coordination found in a solution train. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Principles of an agile release train

An Agile Release Train (ART) takes its cues from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to ensure that multiple agile teams can align and collaborate seamlessly. Here are the core principles that guide an Agile Release Train:

Fixed schedule

ARTs adhere to a predefined schedule to deliver work consistently. This schedule is organized through Program Increments (PIs), which are typically 12 weeks long. The fixed cadence helps teams plan and deliver work efficiently.

Bi-weekly cadence

Much like individual agile teams work in sprints, ARTs operate in two-week segments known as system increments. This regular rhythm facilitates continuous progress and rapid feedback cycles.

Known velocity

The train's capacity to produce work in a given PI—referred to as velocity—is derived from historical performance data. By dividing projects into smaller tasks, teams can prioritize and deliver essential features more effectively.

Develop on cadence, release on demand

While development follows a rigid schedule, the release date is flexible and depends on project completion. This approach allows teams to continuously provide value to customers without being restricted by fixed release dates.

Program increment planning

PI planning is a cornerstone event where all agile teams within the ART come together, usually in person, to establish strategic objectives for the upcoming increment. This collaborative planning ensures everyone is aligned and working towards common goals.

Innovation and planning

At the end of each PI, teams participate in an innovation and planning (IP) event. This period is dedicated to planning the next increment, engaging in educational activities, and addressing infrastructure needs.

Inspect and adapt

To foster continuous improvement, ARTs hold an inspect and adapt (IA) event at the end of every PI. Teams assess their progress and identify areas for improvement through a problem-solving workshop, ensuring that they are always refining their processes and delivering better results.

Roles in a SAFe agile release train

Generally, teams use an ART in a Scrum environment, but, SAFe and agile release train concepts can apply to any agile methodology, including extreme programming (XP), Lean, or Kanban. Regardless of your chosen agile methodology, there are specific roles required to run an ART.

Agile teams

You can't have an ART without agile teams. Thank you, Captain Obvious. 🙄

One difference between SAFe and traditional Scrum is that ARTs allow you to operate with teams dedicated to a specific function, like frontend or backend development, quality assurance, DevOps, security, and business or product functions. ART itself is cross-functional so your teams don't have to be.

Each team is required to have a Scrum Master and Product Owner, just like in Scrum.

Release train engineers (RTEs)

Like Scrum Masters help their team members follow Scrum principles and best practices, release train engineers are servant leaders who do the same for the agile release train. RTEs help ensure the proper execution of program increments, remove blockers, manage risk, and work with the teams on improvements.

Release train engineers typically report to an Agile Management Office, or in the case of Lean, the portfolio management team.

Product managers

While some traditional Scrum teams use both product managers and product owners, SAFe operates at such a scale that both roles are required. The product manager drives the vision, roadmap, and feature backlog while the product owner is responsible for defining the PI objective with the team and executing the functionality.

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System architects

Again, due to the scale at which SAFe teams operate, a system architect is required to design the high-level structure of the overall system, determine how each piece fits into the puzzle, and create stable integration points to bring data and processes into a centralized ERP.

Business owners

The business owners are responsible for achieving business outcomes like revenue or customer acquisition goals. As the primary stakeholder for ARTS, business owners operate at a strategic level and will participate in vision, roadmap, and program increment discussions. Their job is to ensure products are built to meet specific business objectives.

Customers

Customers are the ultimate economic buyers or value users of the solution. Their feedback and needs are critical to the success of the ART.

System teams

System teams typically assist in building and maintaining development, continuous integration, and test environments. They play a crucial role in ensuring that the infrastructure supports the ART effectively.

Shared services

Shared services include specialists necessary for the success of an ART but who cannot be dedicated to a specific train. These often include data security experts, information architects, site reliability engineers (SRE), database administrators (DBAs), and many more.

Get started with your agile release train

So, you're ready to jump on the ART! Great! Let's walk through the steps to get you started on your journey.

1. Start with training

Don't skimp on this one. You likely started your agile practices with some training. Do the same here. All the hard work and best intentions in the world can't help you if you don't have a solid understanding of the basics.

Along with training teams, you'll also want to train your leadership teams and executives. Just like when your company adopted agile principles, you'll want to make sure you have buy-in, an understanding of how agile release trains work, and the roles required to support them.

2. Identify your value streams

There are two types of value streams in SAFe: operational and development. An operational value stream focuses on delivering the value to end-users that was created by the development value stream. An example might be fulfilling an order from an eCommerce website.

A development value stream focuses on developing the business solution, like building that eCommerce website.

Identifying your value streams is important before selecting individuals and teams to work on the value stream and filling the additional roles required for the ART. Once the players have been chosen, you're ready to start planning.

3. Prepare the program increment backlog

It's time to refine your program backlog and get ready for PI planning. Planning and refining are best when you can meet face-to-face, but sometimes in large organizations, that's impossible. If you have a distributed team, make sure you have a good backlog tool like Jira to help facilitate virtual meetings.

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Create your user stories at the program level to fit in a two-week timebox and plan your initial release. Until your teams have established a predictable velocity, leave some wiggle room in the iteration.

4. Start the program increment

Now, it's Scrum as usual. You have your sprint ready to go — just execute it like normal. At the end of the sprint, you can add your teams' contribution to the release train.

5. Rinse and repeat

Agile release trains are a continuous, iterative delivery mechanism. Just like traditional Scrum, your teams will build, release, learn, and then start building again. Don't forget to schedule an innovation and planning iteration to give the team a break from the train and time to improve their systems or their team.

Are you ready to jump on board?

SAFe and agile release trains help teams maintain agile development practices as they scale up in size. What may look complicated at first glance is actually a well-orchestrated process designed for team synchronization according to business value streams.

Use the Scrum knowledge you have within the individual teams, and then train in SAFe practices and get prepared to build your first agile release train. You'll learn by doing but save yourself and your company some headaches and money and invest in training first.

We've linked to some great learning articles throughout this piece, but here are a few more to help you jumpstart your SAFe learning:

• The Ultimate Guide to PI Planning [2021 SAFe Edition]
• SAFe Program Board 101: Everything You Need To Know
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) 5.0 — The Easy Agile Review
• Streamline your workflows with better PI Planning software
• How to prepare for distributed PI Planning

Good luck on your agile journey and stay SAFe! (Too corny??🤦🏽‍♀️)