Agile frameworks, analogue tools

Working Products is a conference in Hamburg on topics of agile product development. For the eighth time, experts from this field met at Goldbekhaus to exchange ideas about product culture and management in diverse workshop and lecture formats, and to promote agile product development in Germany. D-LABS was also invited: As Consultants Process & Innovation we - Maike Vocke and Lukas Mößner - contributed a workshop titled Discover the Potential of Agile Frameworks Through Analogue Tools.

What are agile frameworks…

Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, Design Thinking… In the context of product development, there are countless agile frameworks. Such a collection of names and abbreviations can quickly become intimidating. At the same time, there are always challenges to be found in the (agile) working world that arise regardless of the chosen framework. For such cross-framework problems, cross-framework solutions are needed.

What is the common denominator of these methods, then? To prove that agile product development should never be abstract and always tangible and pragmatic, we use analogue tools. For our workshop, we specifically focused on the prototyping phase - and used common objects such as LEGO figures and post-its.

…and what do LEGOs have to do with it?

Some people are already familiar with them: The design thinking principles “Think with your Hands” and “Build on the Ideas of Others”. But how to put them into practice? The goal of our workshop was to let the participants experience first-hand how the simplest tools can inspire creativity and innovation. As an example, we created prototypes out of LEGO that illustrate how informal knowledge sharing can work in organizations.

A lively discussion at the end allowed us to reflect on the benefits of collaboration in analogue settings, solving cross-framework problems through prototyping tools and the integration of such methods in our day-to-day at work. For us, Working Products provided a lot of inspiration: We were able to get to know different perspectives and approaches, share our own knowledge and experience, and work with like-minded people on advancing agile product development.

What remains to be said is this: Thank you for the invitation, dear organizers, and especially Beata Lange for the beautiful photos - we’re happy to come back next year!