Kevin E. Schlabach

Tag: Manifesto

  • Meditate on the Manifesto

    For 20+ years, I’ve watched people reduce Agile debates to Scrum-centric thinking, and now often to SAFe-centric thinking. But the real reference point is the Manifesto, not a framework. The 17 signers in Snowbird agreed on 4 Values and 12 Principles without naming an approach because they were not all coming from the same viewpoint. That matters, because the founding mix was broader than many people remember. By my count, the mix was something like 7 XP, 3 Scrum, 2 Crystal, and the rest from other adjacent frameworks.

    Scrum was not the center of the story, only part of it.

    This is why it is important to remember that Scrum is Agile, but Agile is not Scrum. Prescriptive Scrum can be a great place to start, but instead of assuming a graduation to SAFe (or some other scaled framework), your path might be better served by Kanban, Lean, XP, Crystal, or some blend of tools across several frameworks.

    Your goal should be a fit-for-purpose solution for the environment you’re actually in.

    This is one of the reasons I like to periodically revisit the Manifesto, especially when joining a new organization. A weekly lunch with interested Agile peers, working through one Value or Principle at a time, can create space for a deeper 30-minute discussion. What did this line mean when it was drafted, why was it written? What was the context back then? Does it still hold up? Should it evolve? How does it apply to our environment here?

    It still surprises me how many people in those groups have never really stopped to ponder these ideas in their raw form.

    Before you argue practices, spend some time with the principles.

    When was the last time you and your team meditated on the Agile Manifesto?

  • Go to the Gemba

    I was recently reading a post about how some Product Managers skip customer interviews.(I’ll set aside the issue that this step is being skipped, as real-world feedback after launch tends to humble that approach.) The post focused on starting with a few strong questions during customer interviews to identify the unknown, validate real issues, and understand associated costs to help prioritize them.

    That all makes sense and is generally good advice. But I found myself thinking there was one piece missing from the conversation.

    There’s a concept from Lean called “going to the gemba.” The oversimplified version is going to where the work actually happens and seeing it for yourself. When I think about user interviews, it comes down to adding one simple question:

    “Can you show me?”

    User descriptions can be notoriously mistranslated. People explain what they think is happening, or what they believe is important, and a lot gets lost in translation. Watching the work in action tends to remove that gap pretty quickly.

    I saw this years ago working on software used in operating rooms. At the time, everything we built across the hospital’s ecosystem followed the same pattern: clean white interfaces across the entire product suite for consistency, simplicity, and ease of use.

    But we kept getting signals that OR users didn’t like the UI, without much detail. It started to impact our ability to engage beta customers and have meaningful conversations about adoption in places where we already had a foothold.

    So we went to the gemba and observed.

    It turns out, operating rooms are dark environments. People are very intentional about what they focus on and how they see the procedure. Keyboards are covered for sterility and not easy to use, and the entire space is optimized around controlled and directed lighting.

    In that context, a bright interface wasn’t just inconvenient, it didn’t fit the environment at all. It created a glow that disrupted the entire room.

    That observation changed the direction of the design quickly. We shifted toward simpler interactions and dark-themed interfaces that worked with the environment instead of against it. It was something we wouldn’t have fully understood just by asking questions, as this clinical context was very different from the others our solutions had been optimized for.

    What people say only goes so far, but you can uncover a lot by watching the work directly.

    Go to the gemba.