Promote skin in the game

Smart people don’t want you to tell them what to do. Instead, they want to take a crack at a hard problem worth solving. This is where your teams’ ways of working come into play. Here are a few ways to promote skin in the game.

• Scrum is the most popular agile methodology, so make scrum ceremonies more asynchronous. Once you do this, embrace modes of working that give people even more autonomy. After all, the agile movement is all about people, outcomes, software quality and embracing change, isn’t it?

• Organise people into pods that own features or system capabilities. Encourage them to own this area and give them free rein of decisions for this part of your project.

• There are already voices in the industry that question the status quo of the scrum product backlog or the Kanban board full of tasks. Arguably, this is a reductionist approach to building software. People pick up tasks in a mechanistic fashion, but they lose sight of the big picture. Instead, can small groups of people come together to achieve specific outcomes? Let them define their own tasks. This is what we do as part of the “Shape up” approach.