Arvid Torset

Building software development teams from ground up has been Arvid´s main specialty for more than ten years. His task is to assemble the technologies that are suitable for a particular business problem and then find the right set of people and skills for them. He has done this for clients in hugely diverse domains and also for several companies where he was a co-founder. Work on all these projects have revealed the same problem: traditional tools and artefacts are not very suitable to establish efficient communication in team that try to work lean way. It is a new process that is needed, the process that ties all the stakeholders and developers closer together – from the CEO to the QA. Arvid is working on creating this process and teaching the teams to sustain and evolve it.  

Wednesday 13th of March 14:30 - What to Build First: Goal-Oriented MVP

What to build first? We ask this question when we configure both a brand new product or a new set of functionality in an existing one. How to define what is in and what is out? How not to miss something important? How to leave emotions and company politics out of MVP equation? And how to go from the vision to the release plan?

Goal-oriented MVP is a methodology that joins principles of lean business model, human-oriented design and agile development. It covers the whole process step by step: from initial vision all the way to mockups and detailed plan of the first release. The approach we suggest is elegant, scientific and proven by practice. It ensures that the release is really minimal, but at the same time complete and helps to solve user problems and reach business goals.

What we suggest is not a strict framework, but a set of flexible techniques that are applicable in different projects with different stakeholders and team composition. We focus on team collaboration but we do not try to make everyone a designer. Instead we show how to include different people at the right time so that we are building a product together, but still everyone is doing their own job.

The participants will learn:

  • How to decide what is really necessary to build in the first version of the product and what should wait until stage two;
  • How to make this first version as small as it can be and send it to the market as early as possible;
  • How to proceed from the overall vision all the way to well structured Agile sprints.