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5 Things I Learned About Lean MVP as a
Professional Opera Singer
In this Session we will …
• … explore what goes behind putting on musical & opera
productions, introducing fun & useful templates,
techniques, exercises, and games that can be used to
breathe new life into your stuck or stale Lean endeavors.
@DeanPeters | Red Hat Agile Day 2017 | DeanOnDelivery.com

Prologue
DEAN’S LEAN MVP EXPERIENCES & EXPERIMENTS

Let’s be Honest …
… many of us first learned about opera on Saturday mornings.

And though larger than life, did you know …
… operas are produced iteratively?

Opera productions map nicely to popular planning canvases
Plot / Journey Feedback for story
tell validation
Learn
Measure
Build
Character
Archetype
Emotional
Recall
Build
Story / vision Rehearse / Perform
Feature Solos
/ Ensembles
Individual
Personas
Look Familiar?

MVP Canvas
Shamelessly borrowed from the Caroli.org/MVPCanvas

Though enormous in its delivery, did you know …
… opera is an aggregate of many small pieces & performances?
Lyric Opera of Chicago from their 2015 production of Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow

The production milestones maps nicely to known release processes
Performance Blocking
Sound, Light,
Costumes,
Props, Set
Ensemble
Rehearsals
Character
Development
Individual
Practice
Walk
Through
Dress
Rehearsals
Performance
Look Familiar?

Git Flow Release Process
Brazenly liberated from Atlassian Gitflow Workflow

How do I know This?
Aside from a Master’s in Computer Science
and 20+ years of experience in Software?
• Grew up in the theater, starting at age 6
• BA in Music, Studying Voice
• Studied in Janet Bookspan’s Studio
• Lead roles in 2 World Premiers
• Roles summer stock & music theater productions
• Various other paying character opera roles

And my own experiments with Lean in the enterprise

Dean’s Lean MVP experience at McClatchy
Mission
• Lose the 3rd Party Mobile App Provider
• Bring In House 120 iOS & Android Apps
• Do it all in 8 Months

Dean’s Lean MVP experience at McClatchy
• Hypothesize on what the right things to build & deliver were based on past experiences & data.
• First iteration was for “Idaho Outdoors”
• Measured against specific personas & devices
• Learned ‘How’ as much as ‘What’
• Expanded via other similar pubs
• Bonus! Acquired an appreciation of prospecting

Dean’s Lean MVP experience at Aprimo
Challenge:
• Update the UI for a 15 year old application
• Specifically target 300+ list/grid view pages
• Build it all within the current code base

Dean’s Lean MVP experience at Aprimo
• Started with 3 key pages based on utilization/role
• Zeroed in 2 key roles & then personas
• Built releases guarded by feature flags + domain/user rights
• Figured out how to institute an early adopter program to measure feedback
• Learned that some of our initial UX assumptions weren’t on-target
• Pivoted quickly via build-measure-learn iterations to deliver the right thing

Programme
Today I’ll share some exercises, & techniques from opera & theater to:
• Breathe new life into stale personas
• Injecting emotional empathy user stories
• An example of Build-Measure-Learn for a new opera
• How to rehearse your way to better sprint demos
• Insights to ensure your performance enjoys a long run

Act 1, Scene 1
PERSONAS • CHARACTERS
@DeanPeters | Red Hat Agile Day 2017 |
DeanOnDelivery.com

Personas • Journeys

Don’t Skimp on Personas
Show of hands if your user stories start with ?
• As a user of XYZ system …
• As a butcher/baker/candlestick-maker ...
• Logged in as someone who needs to do ABC …

UX Boilerplates to get you started
Introduction to User Personas | UX Lady
Best UX Persona Examples & Templates
for Designers to Know Users Better

Keep in mind, a Role does not a Persona Make
Show of hands
• User story starts with ‘Annie the Accountant’ ?
• You stop collecting data on Annie?
• Annie’s image becomes stale, possibly tarnished?
• Your team soon loses all empathy for Annie ?
• You eventually see Annie is just a synonym for the Accountant role ?

Creating a Role
Based on the founder of ‘Method Acting’
• Studying the Person
• Attaining Emotional Empathy
• Feeling the Physical Embodiment
from ‘Creating a Role’ by Konstantin Stanislavski

Exercise 1 : What’s my Motivation?
From the Perspective of the Persona, ask …
1. Who am I?
2. Where am I?
3. What time is it?
4. What do I want?
5. Why do I want it?
6. How will I get what I want?
7. What must I overcome to get what I want?
from Stanislavski’s 7 Questions for Better Understanding
Leontyne Price as Cleopatra
Maria Callas as Medea

Act 1, Scene 2
EMPATHY • USER JOURNEY
DeanOnDelivery.com

Emotional Journey
Some questions to add empathy & life to your persona:
1. What does your persona fear the most?
2. What she will do to avoid her greatest fear?
3. What is he capable of doing if he don’t get what he wants?

Exercise 2a. Emotional Recall
1. Close your eyes
2. Think about a big purchase that made you happy.
3. What was your expression when handed the keys?
4. Who did you call first?
5. How did you sleep that night?
6. How many people did you tell that week?
7. Open your eyes
8. Write down some words that reflect how you felt
Maria Ewing & Hermann Prey
Le Nozze di Figaro

Exercise 2b. Emotional Recall
1. Close your eyes again
2. Think about a time you were fired, laid off, put on a PIP?
3. How quickly did you go somewhere to calm down?
4. How did you feel telling a significant other?
5. How did you sleep that night?
6. How embarrassed were you to tell others?
7. Open your eyes
8. Write down some words that reflect how you felt
Jessye Norman in Macbeth

Exercise 2c. Emotional Recall
• Think about your client, what happens to them when they potentially get in
trouble for buying your software and can’t get their job done.
• Think about times your client may exhibit similar emotions?
• Write these trigger words into your user stories to evoke emotional empathy.
• BTW, This is how some actors cry on demand

Additional & Fun Acting Exercises
• Park Bench Game
◦ A classic improvisation game based around the characters you might
meet on a park bench.
• Who’s Knocking
◦ The objective is to communicate who they are solely by how they
knock on the door, so they can’t add any dialogue.
• Personal Advert
◦ Create a Craigslist personal ad to highlight the best and worst of you
or your character’s personality.

Act 2, Scene 1
BUILD • MEASURE • LEARN
DeanOnDelivery.com

Build • Measure • Learn

Build
In creating on new opera, we ask …
• What story are we trying to tell?
• What problem/pain-point is the plot facing/solving?
• Are our characters correct?
• Do we know if combined, we have a cohesive cast?
• Does the music reflect the interactions?
• Do we have continuity and flow?
Ming Cho Lee scale model for Boris Godunov
(Coronation) 1974, Metropolitan Opera

Measure
What are we measuring?
◦ Notes
◦ Phrasing
◦ Interactions
◦ Blend
◦ Timing
How do we measure it?
◦ Record it
◦ Open Rehearsals
◦ Test Scenes
◦ Assistants in the Audience
◦ Notes … lots of Notes

Learn
• Culture of constructive criticism
• A history of notes
• An archive of recordings
• Log of audience reactions
• Media Reviews

Some Context: Cathedral v. Dracula
• I got paid to sing “20th Century” operas
• Very experimental in nature
• Very iterative process to final work
• Played leads in two World Premiers
• St. Christopher, Cathedral
• Renfield, Dracula

Dracula – let’s not try to eat the rat whole
Opera-ize the “Mad
Scene”
We believe that a test audience
will give us feedback on how
they like a modernized,
microtonal approach to the
“Mad Scene.”
• Music on scale 1 to 5
• Characters on scale of 1 to 5
• Plot/libretto on scale of 1 to 5
• Opera audience
• Non-opera test audience
• Vary location & over-the-topness
• Count Dracula.
• Dr. Van Helsing
• Renfield
10 performances, at
reviewer’s locale.
Accompanist. $750
• Live Cast
• A desk, a chair, and
a rubber rat
• Piano
accompaniment
• Scorecards
• Rehearsals
Flies and spiders and
roaches galore …
… their blood is
mine, for me to
adore!

What we learned
• Audiences in Greenwich Village = best results
• Upper West Side audiences = moderate results
• Upper East Side audiences = good results
• Microtonalism was fine for the weirdo role
• The more “over the top” the performance, better the results for weirdo role
• Audiences wanted more traditional music for the more traditionally rendered roles
• We had to shave 45 minutes off the entire opera to make it work

Dracula – map, after the data was collected
Opera-ize the Bram
Stoker Novel
We believe
audiences will pay to
see a larger-than life,
musically modern
adaptation of the tale
• Box office receipts
• Newspaper
reviews
• Media interviews
• Road shows
• Peer reviews
• Count Dracula.
• Mina Harker
• Jonathan Harker
• Lucy Westerna
• Dr. Van Helsing
• Renfield
Two Weeks Off-
Broadway, $75k to
$100k
• Live Cast
• Minimal Set
• Costumes
• Synthesized Orch.
• Full lighting
• Ad space & air time
• Recording
• Rehearsals
• Programs, Posters …
Read the book!

Act 2, Scene 2
REHEARSE • ADJUST
DeanOnDelivery.com

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
• Practice, Practice, Practice is only 50% Correct
• Avoiding learning the recording, scratches and all
• Perfect Practice makes Perfect
• This works great for your Sprint Demos too!

Perfect Practice v. “Scratches & All”
• Real-to-life setup
• Learn your materials
• Learn THEIR materials
• Practice more than once
• Understand the room setup
• Practice in front of real people
Conductor Riccardo Frizza leads the rehearsal for Norma.
Photo: Jonathan Tichler/Met Opera

Act 2, Finale
PERFORM • SHIP • DEPLOY
DeanOnDelivery.com

Understand how a show is produced
• No matter what role you play on stage or off (e.g. don’t be a jerk)
• Know who is doing what behind the scenes
• Go ahead, offend the person doing costumes, props, or lighting
• Stories from shows gone sideways
• Avoid bad outcomes & surprises by knowing more than your role requires

Git Flow example
Go ahead, offend devops or QA
Who knows what Git Flow is?
Who knows what happens when a dev in the GF model commits code?
Who knows what happens when the committed code hits the Jenkins or Bamboo service?
Who knows what happens when the commit code goes from Dev to Prod?
These add potential costs, delays, & points of failure but give you consistency and quality of
product in the end.

Epilogue
MODERN • PRODUCT • MANAGER
DeanOnDelivery.com

Coda
1. Utilize characterization tools from theater to add depth to your personas
2. Leverage acting exercises and games to gain empathy for your personas
3. Build-Measure-Learn using the MVP Canvas as your guide
4. Perfect Practice makes Perfect
5. Consider a Culture of Constructive Criticism into your Deliveries

Am I the model of a modern product manager?

Verse 1:1
I am the very model of a modern product manager,
I’ve information capital and technical and customer;
I know the things of Agile, I can quote its dozen principles,
From change collaboration to delivery sustainable.

Verse 1:2
I’m very well acquainted too with scrum teams capabilities,
I understand sprint planning, both in sizing and priorities;
I offer stories every Sprint that suit a squad’s capacity …
With many cheerful burn-down charts about a team’s velocity!

Verse 1:3
I’m very good at integral and different’al analysis,
I know the science used to find a feature asomatous;
In short, in matters technical and capital and customer,
I am the very model of a modern Product Manager.

Verse 2:1
I know our Agile founders such as Cockburn, Schwaber, Sutherland,
I answer hard heuristics, I resist the urge to over-plan;
I rail in analytics all the crimes of upfront estimates,
Prepondering hypotheses whose values are commensurate.

Verse 2:2
On bug tickets I must insist on step lists reproducible,
Addressing debt that’s technical whenever it is possible;
In every backlog item I supply a set scenario …
And acceptance tests articulating when a feature’s good to go.

Verse 2:3
I know the risk of P.M.P. and of the girth of waterfall,
Eschewing Gantt & Pert charts, & work breakdowns that are structural;
In short, in matters technical and capital and customer,
I am the very model of a modern Product Manager.

El Fin!
• Twitter: @DeanPeters
• LinkedIn.com/in/DeanPeters
• Blog: DeanOnDelivery.com
• �ݺ�ߣs Share: http://bit.ly/5OperaThings4LeanMVP
• Podcast … coming very soon

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5 Things I Learned About Lean MVP as a Professional Opera Singer - Red Hat Agile Day 2017

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