Quality and Innovation

This morning, I was talking to one of my favorite CEOs. He’s thinking through ways to get his teams to focus on real, authentic, meaningful customer value – instead of using process as crutches.

You may have experienced something similar. Ever found yourself sitting in yet another sprint planning meeting, wondering if you’re just going through the motions? Time and time again, I’ve seen teams dutifully checking off their agile boxes – daily standups, refinement sessions, retrospectives – while somehow missing the forest for the trees.

Here’s the thing: these ceremonies aren’t meant to be corporate ritual theater. They’re actually powerful tools designed to build the foundation of successful delivery. Think of them as the scaffolding that supports what really matters: creating value for your users and clients.

The real magic happens when teams understand that processes like Agile aren’t about rigidly following a playbook. They’re about establishing the relationships, trust, and communication patterns that enable teams to consistently identify and deliver value.

Let me share three examples where teams got this right:

• A dev team at a bank noticed their daily standups were becoming monotonous status updates. Instead of abandoning them completely, they transformed their standups into collaborative problem-solving sessions. Team members now rally around one challenge a day, and actively seek each other’s input, resulting in faster resolution of blockers and more innovative solutions.
• A product team realized they weren’t capturing real user needs – just imagining what they thought users might want. They started inviting customer service representatives to share recent user feedback once a week, leading to a dramatic shift in prioritization and ultimately a 40% increase in feature adoption.
• An enterprise development team found their retrospectives weren’t driving meaningful change. They switched from a cookie cutter “airing of grievances” format to focused discussion around one key challenge per session, and each person left the session with a small but actionable commitment that would shift their individual behavior or expectations. This collective action led to concrete improvements to their deployment process and team collaboration.

Whether your process revolves around a project charter, agile ceremonies, or just writing tickets and delivering incremental work… the process is NOT the point. All processes are in place to achieve an outcome. If the outcome isn’t happening, don’t pat yourself on the back because you’re following the process well.

All process must be in service of authentic value. When teams understand this, they can adapt frameworks to build stronger relationships, maintain clearer communication, and actually do valuable things for their users.