Day 2: Give More of What You Got Juicy Going On

Improv For Agile Retrospective Meetings

Improv for Agile all got started when Ana T. our Product Owner asked me "Would you like to facilitate our agile retrospective meetings with improv?" I said "Oh my yes, and I would love to!" Have I led groups through agile retros before? Nope. Have I played many many many many hours of improv games with my troupes? Well, yes!

I have been facilitating our group retrospectives utilizing improv games, design thinking and energy medicine to identify very specific things in 2 week Sprints:

• Things we liked
• Things we wished/wanted/needed 
• 3 Things to improve in the next Sprint

We had a blast. Result was filled with jolly laughter with tangible things to work on for better Sprint Experience for the next two weeks. Team promoted me to CEO a.k.a Chief Energizer Officer and I humbly said "I take that!" :)

This experience made me realize that I need to offer more of what I do "best" or what comes to me as natural: Improv, Design Thinking and Energy Medicine. I am no longer dwelling on what is lacking in my company "defined" role as a user experience designer at the very moment. No more playing the victim of gazillion constraints that does not allow me to follow a "proper" user experience practice. I am excited about facilitating and solving problems to improve my coworkers work experience. If people are happy at work, they will be happy at home, if they are happy at home, their kids, partners, pets will be happy, too. Butterfly effect!

​RETROSPECTIVE CHALLENGE
Over and over what came up in our agile improv retros was the challenge of cross team communication. Team members were struggling to get the answers they needed from other teams on a timely manner. As a result, some of their tasks were blocked and they were stressed.

PRODUCT OWNER'S PROPOSAL
Ana T. asked "Asli, do you want to help us come up with a solution to solve our cross collaboration problem?", I jumped up and down with joy uttering "Yes, and let's do a Design Thinking Hackathon!" 

Design Thinking Hackathon

Yesterday, we commenced in San Francisco office to hack the team cross communication challenge. I walked the team through each step of design thinking activities:

• Empathize: Engineers learned to empathize with the end users by interviewing their team mates and they learned to draw insights from unexpected and emotional information.
• Define Problem: Each person defined the particular need for their partners. Then we formulated a common need based all the data we gathered.
  • Trailblazers need to find a way to provide the right amount of context easily, so that other team mates are encouraged to provide the exact information that they are looking for complete their tasks timely.
• Ideate: I have provided unconventional prompts to stimulate creativity and subdue fear, so that group can come up with lots of lots of ideas. It was so much fun. And, it was very powerful to prove to engineers that they could be design thinkers and creativity is not only entitled to designers. The energy in the room was so good. We truly felt the flow in this step.
  • Arrange work visits across Big Data Tribe 
  • Assign a weekly Goalie for each Big Data Tribe Team to track questions
  • Get funding to send incentives to thank helpers. from other teams
  • Design a  request form to utilize when sending questions. (See prototype)
  • Peer review the request form before sending the request
  • Build a repository for helpful people
  • Link Flowdock with Rally
• Prototype: We brought down our fun and amazing ideas down to earth and decided to focus on one simple idea we can solve in our near future. For the long term, we can start a Start Up if we want to, because some of our ideas  are so good :) 
• Test: Team is looking forward to get feedback and improve the process once they implement our idea on how to improve cross team communication.

I had a long happy and productive day today. We solved a big problem,
​Sweet dreams are awaiting...