Pop the Happy Bubble

• One thing that happiness is not - is complacency.
• Christa Foley - at Zappos : I love coming to work, rather than encouraging you to become complacent, our positive and uplifting culture makes you work harder.
• They want people who use joy as a driver.
• That the only route to employee happiness is a sense of fulfillment resulting from an important job done well.
• Helping them achieve great things.
• What can companies do to create an atmosphere in which people thrive?
• Managers can encourage autonomy by letting people make their own decisions about their job.
• Managers should have zero tolerance for incivility and never allow an employee to poison corporate culture through abuse or disrespect.
• They don’t realize that continuous improvement means just that, it never ever stops.
• Team might be doing all the things Scrum teaches - prioritization, single-tasking, cross-functionality, review rituals - but they have stopped improving.
• So how do you pop the bubble before your players embarrass themselves on live tv.
• The first step is to be aware of the problem.
• Which is why we measure velocity every sprint.
• The Wise Fool
• Is the person who asks uncomfortable questions or raises uncomfortable truths.
• There are other ways of popping the happy bubble
• Bring in new blood and management intervention.
• With Scrum everything is transparent - how much the team is producing, the quality of their work, how happy the customer is.

Happy Today - Happy Tomorrow

• Harvard professor - asks people what they're doing today makes them happy  and whether it will make them happy tomorrow.
• Four types of people
• Hedonist : is someone who is doing what makes them happy right now - tomorrow? Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow - I'll just enjoy today.
• Nihilists : it sucks today and they think it will suck forever.
• Rat-race addicts : guys who were brought in to run the place.
• The person who is working at stuff that is fun today but has an eye toward a better future and who is convinced it will be more fun forever.
• Happiness Metric is his company - it helps the team help its members become better people.
• The fundamental Attribution Error - when your surrounded by assholes, don’t look for bad people, look for bad systems.
• Top of the pyramid - 'Achieve Ones full potential'
• Scrum focuses on this - helping people achieve personal growth and fulfillment.
• It is not just enough to be happy - harnessed to produce results.
• All the elements of scrum come together to help a person do just that.

The Takaway

• Its the journey not the destination : True happiness is found in the process not the result.
• Happy is the new black
• Quantify Happiness
• Get Better Every day - and measure it : at the end of each sprint, the team should pick one small improvement that will make them happier.
• Secrecy is poison : everyone should know everything
• Make Work Visible : have a board that shows all the work that needs to be done.
• Happiness is Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose : everyone wants to control their own destiny, get better at what they do, and serve a purpose.
• Pop the Happy Bubble : Complacency is the enemy of success.

Priorities

• Scott Maxwell - founder of OpenView Venture Partners.
• Scrum isnt just about teams going faster - its about boosting impact
• Pets.com / Zappos
• Both had vision - what pets.com didn’t have was a sense of priorities.
• How to make faster/better work for you - how to achieve greatness.
• Scott Maxwell - true power in scrum lies in its ready, prioritized, and sized backlog of what to do.

The Backlog: What to Do When

• First thing you do when starting scrum - start a backlog
• You need a clear idea of what you want at the end of work.
• Once you have a vision - you need to consider what it will take to make that happen
• Backlog should have everything you could possibly include in the product
• What are the items that have the biggest business impact. What is most important to the customer.
• Make the most money and the easiest to do.
• You want to get to the things that deliver the most value with the lowest risk.
• 80% of the value is in 20% of the features.
• Customers really only want 20% of them.
• The trick to scrum is figuring out how to build the 20% first.
• The difficult part isnt figuring out what you want to accomplish - its figuring out what you can accomplish.
• Figure out where the most value can be delivered for the least effort. - do that first.
• Need someone who can figure out both what the vision is and where the value lies. (Product Owner)

The Product Owner

• Only three roles in scrum
• You're doing the work
• You're a scrum master
• You're the product owner.
• Decides what should be worked on
• Owns the backlog and more importantly - what order is should be in
• Leadership has nothing to do with authority
• It has to do with knowledge and being a servant leader.
• Scrum Master is the how
• Product Owner is the what
• PO - needs to be able to deliver feedback to the team.
• Half their time with the customers
• Half the time creating the backlog
• The customer is anyone who will get value from what you're doing.
• The scrum master and the team are responsible for how fast they're going and how much faster they can get
• Essential Characteristics of a Product Owner
• Needs to be knowledgeable about the domain
• Know the market well enough to know what will make a difference
• Empowered to make decisions
• Given leeway to make decisions about what the product vision will be.
• Be available to the team
• Accountable for value.
• In business context - what matters is revenue.
• I measure a product owner by how much revenue they deliver per point of effort.