đź‘–
Pants-to-Profit
Agile Planning

  • workshop
  • stakeholder management
  • agile roadmaps
  • lean experiments

đź‘– Pants-to-Profit Agile Planning

A workshop format for teams turning long-term goals into experiment-driven agile roadmaps
by Thomas van Zuijlen

Translating broad company objectives into meaningful plans is hard, especially when you want to remain agile about their execution.

The Pants-to-Profit planning workshop exists to help Product Owners and their development teams bridge the gap between high-level year goals and day-to-day reality, while staying true to agile values and practices rooted in empiricism.

A Common Problem

Consider the entrepreneurial group of Underpants Gnomes featured in an early South Park episode. Their business model has a current practice and something to strive for, but it’s not entirely clear to them how they might get from one to the other.

To various extents, this holds true for many organisations. If your company’s Phase 1 is “Collect Underpants” and its Phase 3 is “Profit” — this workshop will help you turn Phase 2 from “?” into something sensible.

Screenshot from TV show South Park It's got to connect somehow! · © Comedy Central

Objective

Pants-to-Profit helps your agile team write and iterate on lean experiments that align directly with your organisation’s long-term goals - without turning your life into a BDUF nightmare.

In the two-hour workshop, we’ll use a set of broad objectives, relate them to a user journey, identify pain points, write lean experiments around them and turn those into an ordered roadmap.

While executing the steps, we’ll reflect on facilitation choices together so you will be able to apply the same process while tailoring each step to your own context.

Audience

Ideal for agile teams: Product Owners in need of creating a flexible roadmap with the right amount of specificity, Scrum Masters and other facilitators looking to improve their teams’ working contexts, and Development Team members eager to leverage their insights.

Presenter

Thomas van Zuijlen is a passionate facilitator and agilist from the Netherlands. He works as a freelance Scrum Master/agile coach and has a knack for distributed teamwork. A former front-end developer and occasional quiz master, Thomas divides his time between Amsterdam and Vilnius. His weekly Scrum newsletter is called 📬 The Backlog.

Thomas also has a workshop about the collaboration between Scrum Masters and Product Owners, 🥪 The Scrum PB&J.

đź‘– Pants-to-Profit Agile Planning workshop at your event?

A hands-on workshop for agile practitioners to turn long-term objectives into experiment-driven agile roadmaps.

  • 10-20 people
  • in English or in Dutch
  • intended audience: Product Owners, coaches, devs
  • level: adapts to audience
IRL version
  • 120 minutes
  • materials: flip-overs, post-its, markers
  • space: large room, chairs, no tables
Online version
  • 2Ă— 120 minutes
  • materials: Miro & Zoom
  • space: large room, chairs, no tables

Get in touch with Thomas via thomas@vanzuijlen.com