Paulo Caroli - Lean Inception: How to Align People and Build the Right Product

The naive view of agile software development is that everyone just dives in andstarts writing code without spending any time at the beginning working out what to do.

That view, although as erroneous as it is simplistic, is based on a genuine shiftin thinking. Prior to Agiles rise, serious software people advised long periodsof requirements gathering and architecture, where a five-year project mightspend a year or two before any code was written, let alone released intoproduction. The agile world has discarded such long periods of up-frontanalysis, but we still recognize that there is value in setting out with aninitial sense of direction. The challenge is figuring out how we can do this quicklyand efficiently, while remembering that nothing teaches us what we want more than an incomplete product thats released and in use. So, we need to balance setting direction with the knowledge that such up-front thinking is our most tentative.

In ThoughtWorks, our response has been a process called an inception. We gathertogether a good sample of the people who will be affected by the product and have an intensive session to set an initial direction, using a series of exercisesfocusing on collaboration and the capture of broad goals. We dont attempt adetailed specification, as that is exactly the kind of thing that becomes out ofdate as soon as code hits production. But we do want to understand what kind ofoutcomes we are hoping for, the features that we think will drive theseoutcomes, and how to assess the effectiveness of our product.

With The Lean Inception, Paulo has captured his experience in running theseinceptions over the last decade. In particular its focused on his work toboil the inception down to its essence, concentrating the activity on a single,if very intensive, week of work. Paulo shares how he makes thiswork, through writing a product vision, capturing personas, understanding theuser journeys, and developing high-level features. The result isnt a detailedplan of work, which we find quickly rots into irrelevance. It is a guiding setof goals to set us off in the right direction. It doesnt plan out a finalproduct, with all the features that our users will need, instead it focuses onan initial product that we can release and learn from - the Minimum ViableProduct. This product acts as the starting point for evolving a richer and morecapable product, and again we can use lean inceptions to help with each step ofthis evolution.

In this book, youll find Paulos experience harvested from six years of runningthese lean inceptions. Theres a timetable for the weeks activity, detailsof the exercises to do, and tips to help the teams learn from the release ofthe Minimum Viable Product. The efforts of the week are summarized in an MVPCanvas which acts as simple output and summary of the work. Armed with Paulosexperience, you can practice this technique and evolve it to suit your circumstances.

Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks. martinfowler.com

Thank you, ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorkers for inspiring me and using my Lean Inception activities. I truly believe this amazing content emerged from a very specific context which you are part of. My special thanks to ThoughtWorks Brazil, my home country and the cradle of this work.

Thank you to the ones who shared their knowledge about inception workshops and made this work possible. My special thanks to Jeff Patton and Jonathan Rasmusson, with whom I have the pleasure and privilege to learn from.

Thanks, everyone that read, used and shared feedback on the Lean Inception. This content evolved due to the great feedback and the shared experiences. I only realized this was something special once I heard about its success when applied by other facilitators.

Thanks to Martin Fowler for coaching me and asking for this content in English. I really appreciate your support and incentive when sharing important practices with our greater community, such as the Lean Inception.

Thanks to Patrick Sarnacke for the detailed review on this book contents. I really appreciate your inputs since 2008, the year you started learning and improving the Brazilian-English.

Thanks to my family for the love and support while I keep reading and writing, in the pursuit of learning and sharing. My special thanks to Joo Caroli. I can still remember my first trip after you were born. Ive always loved facilitating inceptions, but I love you more and could not stay away for more than a few days. I had to make them lean in order to come back faster. You definitely inspired me!