• agile Innovation Labs.

    Dojos

    Software Crafting

    Product Thinking

    In the Lab

  • Dojos.

    agile Innovation Labs LLC
    Software Crafting

  • Software Crafting.

    agile Innovation Labs LLC
    Dojos

  • Product Thinking.

    agile Innovation Labs LLC
    Product Discovery Canvas

About agile Innovation Labs.

We help organizations build successful products, using Dojos, Software Crafting and Product Thinking.

Get to know us.

  • OUR PHILOSOPHY
  • OUR TEAM
  • OUR STORY
  • 1.
    A New Paridgm

    Companies approach agile with immense expectations, then often experience a letdown when implementing prescriptive one-size-fits-all practices. Workshops and training classes do not prepare your workforce for success. There is a huge difference between the outcomes of training and learning.

    Instead of training, we encourage:

    • Learning in Your Own Context

    • Learning through Repetition

    • Learning over Delivery

    2.
    Place of the Way

    Dojo in Japanese is a space for immersive learning. Though traditionally associated with martial arts, we use the term to reference a space and a mindset. Increasing we are seeing that Continuous Learning is essential for any organization to be successful.

    We use Dojos to help you become a Learning Organization - coaching your organization to learn, in context, using your existing work.

    The path to mastery is practice, repetition and understanding.

    3.
    Full Value Stream

    We start by asking questions, many questions, first around Product Thinking. We then guide questions through Product Discovery, Product Framing (Architectural Understandings) and into Software Crafting.

    We help your organizations to develop better products by applying the Entire Value Stream... teams don’t just explore code commit to deploy (DevOps), they will understand the Customer and the Product, first. They then will learn aspects of Software Crafting.

    Contact us
     
  • team1
    Bill Allen
    Principal Consultant

    Meet Bill - an experienced Dojo Coach / Technical Coach who guides organizations in developing products by applying Dojos, Software Crafting and Product Discovery.

    Bill started his career as an assembler programmer at Sears Roebuck & Co., considered the Amazon of its day. Later, he spent over two decades developing software for many financial exchanges in Chicago.

    His focus is to share pragmatic perspectives towards helping organizations become learning organizations - ones where engineers are learning to build the right products (and not just learning develop and deploy skills); with an outcome of enhanced business value.

    Bill resides in Chicago. When he's not spending time with his family, biking, tennis, or working, he is actively mentoring the next generation of software engineers. He understands the importance of sharing knowledge through Mob Programming hangouts.

    Operations
    Demetra Crowder
    Manager Business Operations

    Demetra is a goal-oriented business professional with over 30-years of experience in finance, intellectual property tech transfer accounting, and business operations. She applies these skills, and more, to keep the lab running.

    For this innovative consulting and development firm, she is the client liaison, scheduling consulting engagements, measures customer satisfaction, plans Lunch & Learns, establishes Standard Operating Procedures for day-to-day operations, strategic initiatives, and optimization of business processes to scale the company's growth.








    Intern - Digital Experience
    Simone Allen
    Creative Strategist + Copy Editor

    Simone is a writer and voice actor, equally comfortable producing written communications or adding an expressive voice to those words. She combines both for developing our marketing materials, curriculum, and conference presentations. Additional duties are research and editorial to improve the effectiveness of existing materials.














  • agile Innovation Labs benefits from the organizational and small start-up agile coaching experiences of Bill Allen. Bill served as the first full-time agile coach and agile evangalist for CME Group, the worlds largest futures and options exchange. There he led the agile practices for a global department of over 500 individuals.

    agile Innovation Labs offers a focused set of services to guide your product success: Dojos • Product Thinking • Software Crafting

    And agile Innovation Labs allocates time in local technology incubators to coach early stage startups. The combined experience of coaching Fortune 1000 and start-ups has shaped our keen insight on how to guide teams to successful product insights.

Services.

We help organizations build successful products, using Dojos, Software Crafting and Product Thinking.

Product Thinking

Product Thinking suggests focusing on outcomes which maximize success for our customers. Realizing that the things that make a product good are the result of customers seeing, trying and using the product. Since all of these things occur after the product ships, one should think in terms of Product Use and not Product Delivery. The Product Thinking focuses on insights for knowing your customers and knowing their experiences with your products.

Dojos

Dojo in japanese is a space for immersive learning. Though traditionally associated with martial arts, we use the term to reference a space and a minsdet. Increasing we are seeing that Continuous learning is essential for any organization to be successful.

We use Dojos to help you become a Learnig Organization - coaching your organization to learn, in context, using your existing work.

The path to mastery is practice, repetition and understanding.

Software Crafting

Practices like test-driven development and pair programming have gained much wider acceptance in recent years. Engineering leaders are understanding the economics of software development in a different way, and these once controversial practices are increasingly sought after. We guide your exploration on the growing valuation of craft in software development.

Virtual Coaching / Mentoring

We are your virtual coach and mentor.

We provide remote access, by phone or Skype, to Executives needing a brief chat to understand the benefits of applying agile practices in their organization.

Services Catalog.

  • Introduction
  • Product Discovery
  • Agile Quick Start
  • Story Maps
  • Agile Testing
  • Learn to Coach
  • Our services catalog (click labels above) is focused on guiding your product success. We help you you on the ‘what and why’ of your product so that you can begin delivering value.

    We create dojos, in your space, for Continuous Learning, using your product context.

    In addition to dojos, we provide services that include: Coaching • Agile readiness audits • Coach Training • Mentoring executives on agile benefits

  • Product Thinking and Product Discovery using the Product Discovery Canvas

    Why Take This Course?

    Building successful products that customers really want and love is very hard. In fact, most product efforts fail!

    Has the ‘build and launch’ approach to product delivery cost your organization too much in time, money and lost opportunity? Do you want to find out if a product idea is actually what a customer will purchase, use and love? Do you now want to build ‘that’ product inexpensively and as quickly as possible?

    If your answers are “Yes”, “Yes” and “Yes” then this two-day workshop is for you.

    What Will You Learn?

    I introduce participants to the Product Discovery Canvas; it applies relevant elements of Collaborative Chartering, Customer Discovery, User Story Mapping, Pretotyping and Lean Startup for product discovery and product validation. The canvas starts with techniques for narrowing ‘product ideas’ to the ‘ideal product’. It ends with techniques for you to inexpensively answer the question, “If you build it, will people buy it and use it?” or “Should you build it at all?”

    This workshop includes numerous exercises for using the Product Discovery Canvas to accomplish these outcomes:

    • Collaborative Product Chartering to align your team around shared product understandings.
    • User Story Maps, for a visual representation of user interaction with the product.
    • Pretotyping, to validate product ideas in hours or days instead of weeks or months, and spending pennies instead of many thousands of dollars.
    • Validated Learning using the Lean Startup feedback loop: Build–Measure–Learn.

    This workshop features an Active Learning component; here participants engage in presentations, discussions and activities for an in-workshop project and then apply that learning to their own product development.

    Who Should Attend?

    The workshop will be of interest to anyone in need of product discovery and validation, including these roles: Product Managers, Product Owners, Marketing, PMO, Architects, Analyst, Testers and Developers.

  • Agile Quick Start

    Why Take This Course?

    Companies approach agile with immense expectations, and then they often experience a letdown when implementing prescriptive one-size-fits-all agile practices. And far too often they either fail or are challenged because the team, leadership or organization don’t sufficiently understand the fundamentals of agility nor how to map them towards effective execution.

    What Will You Learn?

    In this two-day workshop we’ll approach the challenges that your organization is facing and develop appropriate agile practices for improvement. We guide participants through the ‘why and how’ so that they can begin benefiting from agile methods. This workshop features an Active Learning component; here participants engage in presentations, discussions and activities for in-workshop learning and then apply that learning to their challenges. This workshop will cover the following:

    • Engage teams in understanding agile values, principles and practices
    • Understanding the differences between traditional and agile processes
    • Understanding various agile methodologies -- Lean, Scrum, XP and Kanban
    • Understand agile roles and responsibilities
    • Tools that help ready your product team for iterative delivery
    • Pragmatic practices for planning and estimating releases and iterations
    • Tip on setting up your team room with information radiators

    This workshop features an Active Learning components where participants engage in presentations, discussions and activities and then apply that learning to their own product development.

    Who Should Attend?

    Everyone in an organization, including whole product teams: Developers, Testers, Analyst, Product Owners, Management, Technology Architects and representatives from the PMO.

  • Story Mapping Workshop

    Why Take This Course?

    Want to get more done? Add Story Maps to your workflow. Story Maps are a visual representation of work, providing teams options for how to minimize output while maximizing the outcomes and impacts. They provide clear visibility of a product roadmap and/or product portfolio. They provide options on what you choose to build and help you get more done.

    What Will You Learn?

    In this one-day workshop we guide participants far beyond the limits of User Stories and instead enable them to see the big picture of a product under development.

    We show how Story Maps provide:

    • Whole-team, shared understanding of product functionality
    • Validation of business stakeholder needs
    • Collaborative product story telling leading to agreements on what to build
    • Shared understanding on why (analysis) and how (architecture)
    • Improved techniques for Release Planning
    • Improved techniques for Iteration Planning
    • Big Picture thinking first and fine details later

    This workshop features an Active Learning component; here participants engage in presentations, discussions and activities for an in-workshop product and then apply that learning to their own product.

    Who Should Attend?

    This workshop is appropriate for everyone in an organization, including whole product teams: Developers, Testers, Analyst, Product Owners, Management, Technology Architects and representatives from the PMO.

  • We offer several Agile Testing workshops that focus your team on validation, verification and exploration.

    Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD)

    Why Take This Course?

    Does your team develop in one cycle and then perform validation testing in another?

    Would you rather your team perform development and validation in parallel, where throughout development the team can run automated suite of tests to check that everything still works as expected? This workshop guides teams toward automated validation that they are ‘Building the Right it’!

    Does your team develop in one cycle and then perform verification testing in another? Is the mindset of the development - test workflow to find bugs? Wouldn’t you rather your team have a mindset of bug prevention instead of bug detection?

    Do you need to learn a product quickly? Do you want to diversify existing test scripts? Do you want to quickly gather insight about the quality of a product in order to devise a comprehensive testing and release strategy? Then early or end game utilization of Exploratory Testing can provide those benefits, and more.

    What Will You Learn?

    In this two-day workshop participants learn about the Product Discovery Canvas; it applies relevant Lean and Agile practices for product discovery and product validation. The canvas starts with techniques for narrowing ‘product ideas’ to the ‘ideal product’. It ends with techniques for you to inexpensively answer the questions, “If you build it, will people buy it and use it?” or “Should you build it at all?”

    This workshop makes extensive use of exercises that provide students these hands on experiences:

    • Accomplish tactical product visioning
    • Develop a shared understanding by building a Collaborative Product Charter
    • Gain product understanding by creating a User Story Maps
    • Creating pretotypes (pretend prototypes) to validate product ideas in hours or days instead of weeks or months, and spending pennies instead of many thousands of dollars.
    • Gaining rapid feedback by applying Build-Measure-Learn of Lean Startup
    • Building components that provide incremental user value
    • Creating release plans towards success in product implementation and delivery

    This workshop features an Active Learning component; here participants engage in presentations, discussions and activities for an in-workshop project and then apply that learning to their own product development.

    Who Should Attend?

    This workshop is appropriate for everyone in an organization, including whole product teams: Developers, Testers, Analyst, Product Owners, Management, Technology Architects and representatives from the PMO.

    Test-Driven Development (TDD)

    Why Take This Course?

    Does your team write code in one cycle and then perform verification testing in another? Is the mindset of your testers to find bugs? Wouldn’t you rather your whole team have a mindset of writing the correct code at the outset rather than finding and fixing bugs later?

    Test-Driven Development (TDD) focuses developers on the problem to be solved, with the objective being to break down assumptions about the problem, one assumption at a time. TDD, also called “test-first”, is more a design activity than it is an actual testing activity.

    When you have tests for the features under development, then you can safely make changes without the fear of inadvertently breaking the functionality. We show you that by writing the tests first you always have a safety net. You don't have to go back in and add tests later because they were there from the beginning. That kind of confidence is critical to building a long-term, productive, Continuous Integration pipeline for your application. Every time you make a change to the application, you can easily run automated tests to check that everything still works as you expect. 

    In addition to the body of executable tests that result from TDD, code that is written test-first has many properties that make it easy to change and maintain. It is inherently testable, each unit of code can be run in isolation. Writing tests first leads us to observe good design principles like the SOLID principles, because it turns out that these principles make it easy do TDD. The resulting code exhibits high cohesion and loose coupling, comprising many small units of code, each of which can be run and tested in isolation.

    By practicing TDD we only write code to make a test pass, and these results in having the minimal amount of code necessary to complete the task. Less code means fewer bugs, easier maintenance, less unnecessary complexity, shorter learning curve for new engineers. In this way doing TDD goes a long way toward reducing the liability of code, and increasing the asset of working software.

    TDD guides developers to verify that they are ‘Building it Right’.

    What Will You Learn?

    In this one-day workshop participants are introduced to the eXtreme Programming (XP) practice of TDD (Test-Driven Development). Participants will learn:

    • To utilize tests to guide the design of the code
    • To write the test first, thereby starting with a measurable goal. And running the test tells you exactly what to do next to meet your goal. And you know exactly when you're done: when all the tests pass!
    • To utilize TDD as a beneficial accompaniment to a Continuous Integration pipeline
    • Ping-Pong Pair Programming, where one developer starts by writing some tests and another developer writes the code to achieve passing tests. Then they switch!
    • To verify that you are ‘Building it Right’ – that your development is in accordance with the specification

    This workshop features an Active Learning component; here participants engage in presentations, discussions and activities for an in-workshop product and then apply that learning to their own product.

    Who Should Attend?

    This workshop is targeted towards developers and testers that can program. The target language used for instructing this workshop is Java.

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  • Learn to Coach

    Why Take This Course?

    Does your organization desire to develop its own practice of internal agile coaching? Obtaining great results from a team requires the guidance of experienced coaches.

    What Will You Learn?

    In this three-day workshop participants explore a variety of topics as a means of guiding them towards becoming great agile coaches:

    • What is Agile Coaching?
    • How to guide your team to iteratively deliver value?
    • How to focus the team on continuous improvement?
    • How to build reflective communities?
    • How to guide the team in telling product stories?
    • How to balance prescriptive and pragmatic involvement for team success?
    • Crafting your individual coaching style?

    This workshop features numerous Active Learning component; here participants engage in presentations, discussions and activities and then apply that learning to their own agile coaching development.

    Who Should Attend?

    This workshop is targeted to anyone who aspires to foster lasting agility and guide teams towards building successful product.

Events.

Upcoming classes, workshops, speaking engagements and presentations.

  • Open Space Lab Fridays

    Hours 11:00 am - 1:00 pm in the Polsky Center

    Free! One hour of agile coaching on any topic. This opportunity is offered on select Fridays of each month. Please email us now to reserve a one hour time slot.

    Contact Us

  • Learn @ Lunch Fridays

    Hours 11:30 am - 1:00 pm. In your offices.

    Free! 90 minutes of agile training, in your offices, on any topic. This opportunity is offered on select Friday's of each month. You choose how to utilize the time; perhaps a discussion or mini-lab session on any of the agile practices. We simply request that you email us to reserve the next available date.

    Contact Us

Helping organizations build successful products, using Dojos, Software Crafting and Product Thinking..

Blog.

Thoughts, conversations and ramblings on all things agile.

  • Using the Product Discovery Canvas

    Part 4: GOALS, SUCCESS MEASURES, TIMEFRAME FOR DISCOVERY

    Ideally you’ve been following this blog series as we’ve engaged in product discovery for “Card Safe Zone” and you’re using the Product Discovery Canvas for your own product idea(s). So far we have written an “Elevator Pitch” and we’ve identified our potential Users and Customers. Next, we need to identify the product Goals and Success Measures. Also, we’ll establish the amount of time that we will commit to product discovery and validation. Now, let’s move our investigation into Discovery Boxes 3, 4 and 5 on the Product Discovery Canvas. Here we will answer questions to provide the team with valuable insights on determining if our product idea will result in the ideal product.

    12.03.15Read More

  • Using the Product Discovery Canvas

    Part 3: Know your Users and Customers

    Card SafeZone is a mobile app that informs users if it is safe to use their credit card or debit card for on premises purchases. We developed this statement as our Elevator Pitch during the previous post. Now let’s investigate Discovery Box 2 on the Product Discovery Canvas. Here we will develop answers to the questions, “Who the product targets” and “What value they will obtain”. We will then use the canvas to create create personas for the users and customers. We will conclude this post with an investigation into customer validation.

    11.23.15Read More

  • Using the Product Discovery Canvas

    Part 2: Vision Statement (Elevator Pitch)

    The first post in this series made these startling assertions, “building successful products that customers really want and love is really hard” and “most product efforts fail!” But we can engineer success! Let’s begin using the Product Discovery Canvas by exploring Collaborative Chartering — a means for teams to gain early shared understandings about the product.

    11.16.15Read More

  • YACC (Yet Another Curious Canvas)

    Part 1: Introducing the Product Discovery Canvas

    Building successful products that customers really want and love is really hard. In fact, most product efforts fail! I coach clients to approach product development efforts with dedicated time for product discovery. I guide them to apply elements of Collaborative Chartering, Customer Discovery, User Story Mapping, Pretotyping and Lean Startup. And lately I’ve been inventing on, experimenting with, and sharing insights on a product discovery ideation tool that I call “The Product Discovery Canvas”. Let’s look at this canvas and see how you too can use it to guide your product discovery success.

    11.09.15Read More

  • Upcoming Blog topics

    YACC, Part 5: Using the Product Discovery Canvas for Feature Discovery

    YACC, Part 6: Using the Product Discovery Canvas for Product Validation

    YACC, Part 7: Using the Product Discovery Canvas for Validated Learning

    Bringing Agile into your Organization? 5 questions that you must answer first!

    Understanding your organizational challenges and is agile the solution?

    Agile Scrabble - Making sense of the words: Agile, Scrum, XP, Lean, Kanban.

    Agile Adoption v.s. Agile Transformation: Understanding the differences.

The Buzz about agile Innovation Labs.

  • "Pivotal to our success building an analytics and optimization platform, agile Innovation Labs served as Agile Coach and key advisor on product discovery, working in a feedback loop that ensured our product produced and performed as required. Thanks!"

    Muzi Mtetwa, Ready Insights

  • "As a small company, working efficiently is not just important it’s critical to our success. I attended a workshop offered at a technology incubator and learned how to turn my gut instincts into valid ideas. "

    Van Grant, Chicago Hearing and Vision

  • "They helped set up an approach and method in how to validate our business model. This helped us save time and money. As we go forward we will continue to use their help to develop or business."

    Yves Bienvenu, Mad Gears inc.


Voice Give us a call.

  • 872.240.2175
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Email Send us a note.

Office By Appointment Only.