Page 1

Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Bootstrapping
a product team

Fernando Díaz Gestal

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ferdiazgestal/
About me

Fernando Díaz Gestal

Product Director - Technology @ King

● Background in Computer Science

● >12 years in Product Management
● eLearning & gaming

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ferdiazgestal/
Page 8
Feeling of going “nowhere” when...
● Arriving into a team not being able to launch something valuable

● You are starting a new product with a new team

● Your product team is not performing ( not delivering outcome)

Traditional to Scrum Team — Forming, Storming Norming and Performing by Warren Lynch
An effective team is a group of individuals
that have a common understanding of:

People – Each other

Process – How they work

Product – Their purpose as a team and the vision for the product

Reference: Bootstrapping a product team by Brendan Marsh (ex-Agile Coach Spotify)

Page 11
Ramon Ferrer Vicens
Agile Coach @ ManoMano

Page 12
“Product team bootstrapping workshop”

People – First contact / Ice breaker

Morning

Product – Purpose / Vision

Lunch

Process – Inbound & outbound

Afternoon

People – Team building exercise

“Product team bootstrapping workshop”

People – First contact / Ice breaker

Morning

Product – Purpose / Vision

Lunch

Process – Inbound & outbound

Afternoon

People – Team building exercise

Purpose / Vision
Page 15
 10 questions to align the team around a purpose
1. Why are we here?
2. What is our product?
3. What do our customers expect from it?
4. What is NOT our product?
5. Who are our neighbours?
6. What could be the solution?
7. What keep us up at night?
8. How big is this thing?
9. What is going to give?
10. What is going to take?

Reference: Agile Inception Deck by Agile Warrior

 10 6 questions to align the team around a purpose
1. Why are we here?
2. What is our product?
3. What do our customers expect from it?
4. What is NOT our product?
5. Who are our neighbours?
6. What could be the solution?
7. What keep us up at night?
8. How big is this thing?
9. What is going to give?
10. What is going to take?

Reference: Agile Inception Deck by Agile Warrior

1. Why are we here?

You can’t build a great product if you don’t know why you
are building it in the first place

Enable the team to take balanced trade-offs that will come

up during delivery

Page 18
2. What is our product?

A good elevator pitch tells people

what your product is, who it’s for,
and why it’s special.
You can quickly distill a big
abstract concept into something
tight, real, and concrete.
For <Targeted User>
Who <Need/Problem>
The <Product>
Is A <Solution>
That <Problem-Solution fit>
Unlike <Alternatives>…
The <Product> will ...
Page 19
3. What do our customers expect from it?

If you could walk into a store, and buy

the shrink wrapped version of your
software, what the design of the box
look like and what would it say?

Point here is to get your team looking

at your product through the eyes of
your end customer.
4. What is NOT our product?

Saying yes is easy. It’s saying no what is hard.

Set expectations around what you are not going to be

doing as part of this product.
5. Who are our neighbours?

It’s easy to think it’s all about you and your core team.

Thinking ahead of time about who you are going to want

to meet and establish relationships with before going live
6. What keep us up at night?

Identify the risks that are worth worrying about and not
sweat the ones that aren’t.
What about remote teams?

Page 24
Tweaks:
• Run the deck individually with each team member

• Diagnose the misalignments

• Create focus groups to work them out

• Run the workshop remotely (shorter version)

How do we continue?
Page 27
Main benefits:

• The whole team thinks from the user perspective

• Align on the problems we want to solve first

• Visualisation of the big picture to define the MVP

Bootstrapping
a product team

Fernando Díaz Gestal

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ferdiazgestal/
Page 31