Design-A-Snack

🎯 Goal: Design and improve a biscuit or drink using feedback from your customers. (45 minutes)

1. Divide into an even number of teams of 3-5 people according to the spreadsheet from prep that was posted on your Slack channel.  One person from each team is the Product Owner. One person in the session is the Facilitator and makes sure that all teams are following the schedule below.

2. The Drink Team will be designing a delicious drink for the Biscuit Team, who will be designing a wonderful biscuit for the Drink Team.

3. There are 3 sprints of 5 minutes each that are broken down as follows.

   • 3 minutes to design the drink or biscuit
   • 1 minute for the Drink Team to demo their drink design to the Biscuit Team and get feedback
   • 1 minute for the Biscuit Team to demo their biscuit design to the Drink Team and get feedback

4. Designs should be made on paper and consider:

   • Name
   • Ingredients
   • Price
   • Graphics
   • Branding
   • Anything else that your customer wants

5. During the demo phase, the customer team must vote using Fist to Five where each customer holds their fist with more fingers the more they like it. The product owner should record the total votes from their customers, and then ask for feedback (but you only have one minute for demo + feedback)

6. After all sprints have been completed, get together as a whole cohort and consider the following questions:

   • If you had had a single sprint of 9 minutes, do you think your customers would have liked your snack as much?
   • How useful was the feedback from customers, and how did you improve the feedback asked for from each round?
   • How did the feedback you received influence the design of the snack?
   • What proportion of your customers did you satisfy at the end?
   • Would you have personally bought this biscuit or drink?
   • Did you let the Product Owner of your team make the prioritisation decisions? Why?
   • How did you find working in your teams?
   • Were there any features that were added that did not come from customer feedback?

WIP-Work in Progress

🎯 Goal: Discuss the use of limiting Work in Progress (WIP) in planning effective sprints. (15 minutes)

In the prep, you played a game to explore how limiting the number of tasks in progress at any time can impact the effectiveness of a team.

As a whole cohort, get together and discuss the following questions:

1. Is it better that developers have a single task to focus on and complete, or a collection of jobs where they can show they are making progress on each one?  Why?
2. Is it better that developers have several small tasks for each sprint or a single large one that occupies the whole sprint?  Why?
3. When planning a new sprint, should a team only plan for the things it is confident it can deliver, or should they make sure they have enough work so that everyone will always be occupied?
4. When a new urgent piece of work is requested by a senior stakeholder halfway through a sprint, is it better to start working on it immediately or wait till the next sprint?  Why?