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We helped Xero’s Global Marketing and Voice of Customer teams to launch Qualtrics and its integrations.
Discover how Xero achieved product delivery excellence through our strategic Lean-Agile transformation.
We defined product scope
The project faced significant challenges, including an undefined product vision and goals, a lack of a product roadmap, and a disorganised, constantly evolving backlog. Despite the project being initiated long ago, the team struggled to release an MVP.
To address these issues, we defined a clear product vision and goals, developed a detailed product roadmap with timelines, and conducted workshops with the business to refine and prioritise the backlog.
As a result, the product scope became well-defined, both the business and the Scrum team gained a clear understanding of the deliverables, and an achievable timeline was developed and agreed upon.
We navigated ownership challenges
The project faced significant challenges due to the Business Product Owner not participating in Scrum ceremonies or activities. The Scrum team performed backlog grooming and prioritisation without stakeholder involvement, and reviews and retrospectives were not conducted.
To address these issues, we appointed a Proxy Product Owner to bridge the gap between the Scrum team and business stakeholders. As the Proxy PO, we facilitated and led all Scrum ceremonies for the team and all meetings with business stakeholders.
This resulted in more effective stand-ups, providing clear visibility into team activities and expected completion times, better planning of subsequent activities, and ensured that retrospectives incorporated feedback for actionable improvements. Additionally, reviews looped product feedback back into the backlog.
We streamlined communication
A considerable time elapsed since the project’s inception, leading to a breakdown in communication between the Scrum team and the business stakeholders.
To address this, we consistently maintained communication with the business as the Proxy Product Owner, validating priorities and managing expectations. We also coached the team by leading through example.
As a result, communication with business stakeholders improved significantly, with a fivefold increase in meetings for requirements clarification, prioritisation, release planning, and governance. The Scrum team demonstrated improved interactions and communication patterns.
We eliminated information chaos
User stories lacked clear beginnings and endings. They had business and functional requirements mixed together, and were heavily dependent on each other. As stakeholders gained a better understanding of their needs, frequent change in requirements were requested. This led to repeated rework.
To address these challenges, we refined and broke down user stories to ensure clarity and defined endpoints. As the Proxy Product Owner, we aligned solutioning and functional requirements with business needs, significantly reducing changes in requirements. We also implemented Just-in-Time principles, clarifying requirements just in time for development.
As a result, planning became more efficient, enabling effective quarterly planning, alignment on business requirements drastically reduced changes, and the number of blockers was halved.
We improved product delivery
The team faced challenges with stories containing mixed-up requirements, leading to fragmented development. They also faced difficulties in moving stories to testing due to duplicated information and interdependencies. Multiple team members working on a single story resulted in a lack of ownership of the deliverable as a whole.
To address these issues, we broke down user stories to allow single ownership, introduced estimation processes to ensure stories could be completed and released within a sprint, and implemented Just-in-Time principles where development commenced just in time when the feature was needed.
As a result, development tasks progressed smoothly, team motivation and morale increased significantly, performance and productivity saw a tenfold improvement with a drastic reduction in cycle time, and the team successfully released an MVP within three months of engagement, followed by successful product iterations every sprint thereafter.
We enhanced quality assurance processes
Requirements in stories being mixed up and interdependent, prevented them from progressing to testing. For the stories that arrived at testing, lack of a defined testing process prevented them from progressing to release. The processes for functional testing and user acceptance testing (UAT) were unclear and mixed up.
To address this, we implemented clear processes for functional testing and UAT, ensuring that UAT was conducted based on business requirements rather than functional requirements.
As a result, both functional testing and UAT progressed smoothly, leading to a fivefold reduction in defects. This approach provided the business with high levels of confidence in both the team and the product.