Collaborating with clients in Miro: How Crema builds trust with retrospectives

Friday, October 30, 2020

Agile transformation is hard. Leaning into it requires pushing the comfort of your organization’s culture and expertise. Navigating company politics is a necessary truth due to the perceived relinquishment of control it asks leaders for. Perhaps most insidious of all is facing down the challenge of your team’s doubt in the yet-to-be-seen results a successful agile transformation could have.

Yet, all of these challenges can be circumnavigated if everyone engages in the agile transformation themselves. Miro, as a collaborative digital whiteboard tool, can empower you to lead an organic agile transformation. One that your team won’t doubt as soon as they get into the tool and see how immediate its impact on their work is. One that your unswayable leaders see that the natural transparency of Miro provides more value through understanding than single-focused control ever did. One that your organization’s culture will swarm around and be excited to engage with and have fun along the way.

Throughout this guide, we’ll cover how you can use Miro to show your agile transformation through visuals and participation. We’re all professionals, but we are ultimately humans at the end of the day: visualizations matter and they easily “click,” which can help drive forward transformative positive change. Our agile transformation guide will leverage the visual and collaborative nature of Miro to guide us through how to implement it in your organization. We will cover how to move forward with this transformation in 9 steps:

Along the way, we’ll cover a broad theme of transparency, to make this agile transformation work across your organization. By positioning the transformation as an experiment, you’ll want to lean into a posture of sharing progress and allowing curious others to peer into what is happening. Due to Miro’s visual nature, you may find that others who were perhaps pessimistic about the change might start to try some of the agile exercises in Miro themselves! This organic change is what we’ll be striving to create in your organization as we go through this guide.

Ready? Let’s get started!

Start with a Retrospective

A retrospective is an exercise to look back at your organization’s recent successes and challenges. It’s an opportunity for everyone to come together, regardless of job title, to consider the true impact of how you’ve been collaborating. For our agile transformation, it serves as a fantastic starting point as it naturally will encourage others in your organization to call out collaboration challenges that an agile transformation can solve. It is also the first time Miro will be introduced to many across your organization, to see first-hand the power and fun that it injects into your collaboration.

Schedule this retrospective as a general exercise for your organization. Because Miro has an infinite canvas, you can invite in as many people as you’d like; just be sure to adjust the size of your canvas accordingly before the retrospective. Miro has some great built-in templates for retrospectives you can use and scale as you wish. You will also want to position this retrospective as a fun and anonymous exercise to look back on recent wins and elevate topical challenges. As much as possible, you’ll want to get your company leaders to attend and participate.

Just before the event itself, share out a link to the Miro board. To keep costs minimal as you introduce Miro, you can use the guest link [link], which allows participants to easily join the Miro board without an account. Important to this retrospective, it also keeps participants anonymous, which will encourage authentic participation – even in front of company leadership.

During the retrospective, guide everyone to participate by dropping Miro’s virtual sticky notes on each section of the board. You can use Miro’s timer plugin to time-box each portion of the exercise so that you can keep a healthy and engaging pace. As you move on through each section, as the facilitator, you might find value in grouping similar stickies that share a theme.

As the retrospective proceeds, it’s important to ensure each theme is verbally acknowledged. At this point, try not to stay on any particular theme too long – if you maintain a facilitator’s indifference, it could help your organization suggest true, authentic next steps.

Suggesting the next steps is the final stage of this exercise. Just like the prior sections of this retrospective, you will set a timer and ask everyone to suggest the next steps on sticky notes, based on the acknowledged themes. What’s subtly so powerful about this is that perhaps for the first time, both your organization’s leaders and front-line employees are equally contributing to the potential future of your company.

After the next steps have been identified, it’s time to wrap up the retrospective. Here, you should acknowledge the suggested next steps and state that you’ll work with company leadership to identify how to best proceed. The Miro board will continue to be accessible by anyone who wants to view it so that you can iterate and comment on it with leadership. This natural transparency will subtly demonstrate agile collaboration across your organization.

Here’s the outcome of this exercise you just did, if you didn’t notice it already: many of the next steps will naturally be related to improving communication and collaboration. This is where most business challenges always stem from! Your retrospective exercise simply empowered everyone across your organization to elevate, name, and build a shared understanding of them. With this, you’re now positioned to suggest a fast-paced method of addressing most of these next steps with your company leadership: an agile transformation experiment.

Establish an Experimental Team for Agile Transformation

With the retrospective fresh in everyone’s mind, now is the time to meet with company leadership and suggest an experiment for change: take one team in your organization to work on a new project, as an agile team. This team will serve as the testing ground for demonstrating agile transformation and seeing how it fits within your company.

The focus on one team is risk mitigation. It enables your company leadership to move forward with addressing the challenges raised in the retrospective, while not introducing potentially overwhelming change and risk to the rest of the company.

While you should be well-positioned to lead this team transformation, there is a chance you might receive too much pushback from company leadership to officially proceed with this. Don’t stop. While the environment may not be ideal, you can still follow along with many of the exercises in this guide to demonstrate the value in agile collaboration.

Once you have your team, break the ice with a bit of fun. In an initial team introduction meeting, invite everyone into a Miro board, and try breaking the ice with Miro’s icebreaker template. Some laughs and fun Google Images later [link], your team will be bonded and ready for what’s next.

Align the Team on What’s Next

You have the grounds for agile transformation. You have your experimental team. Now it’s time to get to work on your project and demonstrate the results an empowered team like this can generate.

To align on what to build, use a Lean Canvas or similar Miro template to collaboratively brainstorm on what “could be” for what you’re building. Walking through a canvas exercise will help establish your initial assumptions and hypothesis on finding success in what you’ll build.

As you go through this excise, leverage Miro’s timer and voting plugins [links] to facilitate effectively so that you are ensured to get the best from your team. Naturally, this will also help cultivate alignment and a shared understanding within your team.

After the exercise, you should have a good idea of the vision to pursue your team’s work. At this point, consider inviting in members of your organization outside the team, to offer feedback. You can invite them in as commenters [link] to drop in questions or thoughts for your team to asynchronously respond to and acknowledge.

Transparently sharing your work with your company, even at this early stage, is incredibly powerful. You’re demonstrating value, visually, with Miro by blasting down any perceived walls around your team to help keep your organization in sync.

Research and Experiment

You likely (and should) have many questions coming out of your prior sessions. Now is the time to research, validate, and experiment before you starting building.

For addressing key questions, a Design Sprint [link] might be valuable here. This can be facilitated completely in Miro [link], which can serve as an excellent demonstration of the type of agile collaboration and transparency possible in a truly agile team.

At this stage, design sketches and prototyping might be helpful. Explore the “Research & Design” section of Miro’s templates for helpful tools and add them to your board for your team to use.

The “UX Research and Design” section of Miro’s app integrations will also be helpful here. For example, if your designer uses Sketch, you can directly integrate artboards [link] for commenting. If you use InVision for your prototypes, you can also add those directly to your board [link]. If you want to collaboratively build and share ideas, Miro’s powerful wireframe tool [link] can help you quickly explore what “could be.”

Again, this is also an opportune time to invite others outside your team to at the very least, visually see how quickly alignment may be achieved.

Define Initial Requirements

At this point, you might be starting to experience a great pace. Especially for hashing our research and design experiments, your team might be starting to default to using Miro. Let this happen. Any organic collaboration on the periphery of what your core exercises are is what it means to be truly agile. If you’re finding your team’s use of Miro to still be rather process-driven and formal, try using comments to prompt asynchronous collaboration on a Miro board when not formally in use. Miro’s “@board” reference can be a great conversation prompt, much like Slack’s “@channel” reference.

As you collaborate on research and experimentation, you’ll want to identify a point where you have enough confidence to develop an initial set of requirements. These requirements shouldn’t be treated as unchangeable, but they should be used as a good starting point for collaborative, agile development sprints.

To facilitate the development of the requirements with your team, a story mapping exercise can be useful. Story mapping is the process of lining out the journey a user would take through your product to accomplish set goals. As a team, you can go deep into each section to identify the requirements needed for a step to be completed. The reason story mapping is supportive of an agile transformation is that it keeps the focus of requirements on user outcomes, rather than functional implementation. How it is built is generally left up to your team to determine as they are developing it, to maximize effectiveness and efficiency.

Miro’s built-in story mapping tools are incredibly valuable here. There are a few templates you can choose from to get started. As you use Miro’s tools to facilitate a story mapping session (or two), be sure to encourage team participation along the way. Your team will surely be thinking about implementation considerations throughout the process; you’ll want to ensure that they feel empowered to note those comments on the board and draw any connections to prior research and experimentation.

Miro is integrated with many tools [link] and if your development team uses Jira, you can use a Jira-integrated version of the story map so that you can easily convert the stories into Jira tickets – a huge time saver!

After your initial mapping is complete, you can employ Miro’s Planning Poker app to help estimate the effort of the stories. Planning poker is a game used to align on what the story point value to complete each story might be. Story points are a relative level of effort measurement, unique to each team and project. Over time, story points prove to be more accurate for tracking progress due to velocity. Your team’s velocity is the average number of story points your team can complete each sprint. The reason this is so valuable in an agile transformation is that over time, it serves as a unique tool for release planning and more. As you go through your first planning poker game, since story point estimation might be new to your org, consider leaving comments explaining what went into the team’s estimate.

Your team should have a pretty good handle on the potential scope of what you want to build. This is a good time to consider the team’s timelines and constraints. For example, is there a mandate to have a release out by a specific date? Does your company leadership desire the first release to include a specific feature? You can use the story mapping tools to split and align on potential releases that can help answer these questions.

Before you wrap up requirements planning, you’ll want to ensure that this story map is located in a special area of your board. It’s valuable to keep this visible for your team and company leadership. You’ll also want to keep coming back to this map to vet your own assumptions as time goes on.

Again, invite others in your company to see this and drop-in questions that can be addressed asynchronously. Especially at this stage, there’s a lot of value of showing.

Since requirements are often viewed as commitments in an organization, there is a chance you’ll get pushback from key stakeholders on how you prioritized the work. That’s ok. In fact, this can be a great (and perhaps intentionally crafted) opportunity to invite them into the process.

Once you’ve sized effort for items and know your time constraints, you have the foundational tools for facilitating prioritization in Miro. Using an “Eisenhower Matrix” template, you can help stakeholders answer what is truly important, given the constraints. The impact of this discussion is very valuable and doing it in Miro establishes transparency and collaboration in an otherwise emotionally hot process.

Learn and Iterate as a Team

It’s time to build! More importantly, it’s time to learn.

If you haven’t already, use Miro’s app integrations to integrate your requirements and work into your development tools of choice, such as Jira, Asana, or Notion. If you don’t have a tool specifically for development, you can use Miro to manage your team’s development! You can set up a kanban template, along with roadmap templates, to manage your work right inside of Miro.

Throughout the day-to-day of your work as a team, be sure to use Miro to collaboratively note and answer questions. Transparency is key so that others in your team may be informed to help solve their own challenges. This also helps keep stakeholders and other company team members in the loop, organically. It builds trust.

There are many agile models of working that we won’t dive into here (e.g., kanban, scrum, SAFe); however, using Miro as a foundational and core tool will organically and foundationally exemplify agile. This way of working (not the process) is the most important part of agile transformation.

Test and Note

When you have work that is ready to show and test with users, consider setting up testing frames [link] on your board for your team to note observations, feedback, and more. Testing should be a team exercise and not limited to one role; although one person should facilitate the user tests. By including your full team in the testing process, you are cultivating empathy via a direct connection between your team’s work and their users. As your team goes through user tests, encourage dropping in notes as stickies, cards, or whatever format your team has naturally leaned into.

The key to this is having your story map visible. The visibility empowers faster connections and learnings to be made throughout testing. It helps validate or challenge your original assumptions.

Following user test sessions, your team can integrate feedback immediately into the master story map. You can add in new story map components, reprioritize releases, or both. Ultimately, listening to your users and connecting their feedback to your work will help improve the outcome of your team’s work.

Retrospect

Again? Yes!

As your team continually develops, iterates, learns, and revisits assumptions on your board it will be imperative to regularly facilitate team retrospectives. These are opportune times to tweak and adapt your processes, as well as your use of Miro.

Retrospectives for your team will also be a great time to celebrate! Looking back on your progress throughout your work together and leading an agile transformation will surely elevate key learnings that are worth acknowledging for yourselves and future agile teams. Inviting in stakeholders and others in your organization, either as participants or just to listen in, can be incredibly valuable. Doing so continues to encourage an environment of transparency and growth, crucial to any agile transformation.

Share your Miro Board with Others

A core theme throughout this journey has been to share and invite others. This is how you show your agile transformation with Miro. Agile, when practiced right, is organic and natural – showing is better than setting it up as a series of processes, lest you risk falling back into old habits.

There’s no doubt that this might be intimidating and could open your team up to intense questioning. Lean into it! Use Miro to guide facilitation and answer those tough considerations. In my experience, it takes a very, very short amount of time to show others the power of this tool and the potential for transformation, if they are part of it.

Your Miro board will live on to serve as a template to help transform other teams in your organization. Perhaps you can convert a version of your board at this stage for others in your company to use as a template [link]?

Either way, you’ve demonstrated the value of an agile transformation by showing, not telling how it is done. Through consistent transparency and showing your work, you’ve invited skeptics into the process to show the real value in an agile transformation – and how powerful tools like Miro can organically support it in the process.

Originally published at Miro on October 30, 2020. This version is the original I submitted. You can read the final published version here.