The 14th Hands-on Agile meetup continues exploring Liberating Structures for Scrum events. Liberating Structures cover a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team—even as a large team—, overcoming traditional communications approaches like presentations, managed discussions, or another disorganized brainstorming at which the loudest participants tend to prevail. Throughout the coming months, we will create exciting new ways how to improve classic Scrum events like the Daily Scrum, the Sprint Review or the Sprint Retrospective. Moreover, we will use Liberating Structures for difficult challenges that agile coaches, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners face, for example, reviewing the existing product design process. This fourth meetup of the “Liberating Structures for Scrum” series will address the Product Backlog.

2. #1
• Team up in pairs
• Introduce yourself briefly to each other
• Share your take on the question:
“What challenges do you bring to this meetup, what can you give to
your peers, and what do you hope to take away in return?”
• Time-box: 5 minutes.
• Swap the listener role after 2-something minutes
• Choose another partner when you hear “Move on.”

3. #2
Let’s address another Scrum issue—the Product Backlog…

4. #3
So far, we have explored eight Liberating Structures microstructures:
• Impromptu Networking
• 1-2-4-All
• 15% Solution
• Shift & Share
• TRIZ
• W3
• 25/10 Crowd Sourcing
• Min Specs

5. #4a
The Ecocyle Planning
Liberating Structures: Ecocycle Planning Co-developed by Keith McCandless + Henri Lipmanowicz (www.liberatingstructures.com) Creative Commons License

6. #4b
The Ecocyle Planning (2)
An an individual:
Create a (meta-level) list of activities, practices & relationships that helped shape
your professional status today.
Use the worksheet for this purpose.
[10 minutes]

7. #4c
The Ecocyle Planning (3)
Now, form pairs:
Decide on the placement of each activities, practices & relationships in the Ecocyle.
[10 minutes]

8. #4c
The Ecocyle Planning (3)
Next, form four groups:
Use 1-2-4-All to aggregate your lists of activities, practices & relationships.
Once aggregated, place them on a flipchart.
[15 minutes]

9. #4d
The Ecocyle Planning (4)
Then step back to digest the patterns. Ask:
What activities do we need to creatively destroy or stop to move forward?
What activities do we need to expand or start to move forward?
[10 minutes]

10. #4e
The Ecocyle Planning (5)
All:
Let’s use Shift & Share to present every group’s findings.
[10 minutes]

11. #5a
Emergency Procedures for a Healthy Product Backlog
It’s your first day at a new job…

12. #5b
Emergency Procedures for a Healthy Product Backlog (2)
• Individually: Create a LS string to start fixing the mess – process,
existing backlog, refinement — ‘tomorrow.’
[5 minutes]
• As a group: Use 1-2-4-All and aggregate all individual strings into a
group string.
[15 minutes]

13. #5c
The LS Micro Structures We Have Used so far
• Impromptu Networking
• 1-2-4-All
• 15% Solution
• Shift & Share
• TRIZ
• W3
• 25/10 Crowd Sourcing
• Min Specs
• Ecocycle Planning

14. #5d
Emergency Procedures for a Healthy Product Backlog (3)
All:
Close the meetup using Shift & Share to present every group’s LS string
of choice.
[10 minutes]

15. #6

16. #7

17. Contact Information
Stefan Wolpers
Email: stefan@age-of-product.com
Blog: Age-of-Product.com
Newsletter: https://age-of-product.com/subscribe (Join 21,800 peers)
Slack: https://hands-onagile.slack.com/ (Join 5,300 peers)
Twitter 1: @StefanW
Twitter 2: @AgeOfProduct