Team Training: SCRUM Hybrid Model to Launch Physical Products on Amazon

Tools Used for This Training

Teamwork Projects
Slack

Transcript

check check, check, all right team uhh this is our introductory scrum hybrid training for physical products, and explain how we’re gonna start doing things starting uhh the beginning of next week, uhh starting Sunday night. So, a lot of times uhh products will get saturated quickly on Amazon so you are, your your advantage will be to be out first and get solidified first in the search rankings uhmm so you get there before everybody else so you’re the top dog and so launching products quickly is a big part of that and getting it out and getting it done and getting it on Amazon as quickly as we can and efficiently as we can, and uhh in terms of revenue like you can kind of uhh estimate the number of SKUs that you need in order to hit certain revenue goals so, you can say you know 10 SKUs will give us an extra $50,000 of revenue, uhh so more SKUs equals more, more money. uhh we’ll hit our goals. (achoo! excuse me.) Alright, so, how are we gonna want to launch more products and launch them quickly and use this new full-time team that we have put together. uhmm well first we got to talk about how we’re gonna organize these tasks we have housekeeping tasks we have slack tasks and we have teamwork project and scrum tasks. So, the housekeeping tasks are kind of daily uhh the daily work that’s part of your positional contract so for, for the customer support people it’s gonna be like support emails, feedback monitoring, uhmm and then you know like listing optimizations for aerith’s uhh sales monitoring uhh for what’s that part is but you, you know it’s it’s kind of in everybody’s uhh contract about what type of thing they do every day. then the slack tasks are more kind of like hey I need help with this it’s the team asking you for something it’s me asking for something it’s Peter asking for something or it’s uhh one of you guys asking each other for something uhh that needs to be kind of done quickly uhmm and and to get so everybody can get their work done uhmm uhh so that’s kind of like uhh the the one-off tasks that are kind of simple and and unscheduled and then that are needed by the team. and then we have team work project tasks and scrum tasks so our scrum tasks are gonna go within teamwork projects and uhh these are more structured long-term projects uhmm occasionally we’ll throw in an urgent item in there or something so you got to keep an eye on it through your email and just through uhmm reviewing your tasks on teamwork projects uhmm but these are things like multi employee projects market data research product development product launches expansions into other sales channels so we’ll go through a little bit more how we’re gonna use it for scrum. So, what is scrum? Scrum is a project management framework kind uhh it’s based on the whole agile methodology which is being able to adapt to things quickly, and not uhmm have these big product releases that take months and months to do and then you you’d only figure out if it’s done right at the end of the project so it’s very uhh flexible and we can do things quickly, and the way we do that is by using small teams we have a team of six or seven right now uhh that have cross-functional ability, so people uhh our team will be able to perform multiple tasks so uhh you know one team member can perform the tasks of another team member and you know it’s everybody’s responsibility to get the tasks done there’s gonna be some some people who have you know very uhh narrow skill set that can’t be done by other people like the photography and, and some of the product uhh graphics and things like that, but you know in general we wanna help each other uhmm learn how to do each other’s jobs uhh so we can all work on any any individual tasks uhmm so scrum uses what’s called Sprint’s which is a focused uhh period of time to complete any any tasks that are designated to be completed during that sprint, uhh so our sprints we’re gonna start off with one-week sprints which we will have a sprint to-do list and our main focus during that time is to just be all over that to-do list like everybody is trying to get that to-do list that Sprint to-do list we want everything in that list done by the end of a week and we’re we’re clawing or scraping where we’re helping each other in order to get that done because it’s a team effort and everybody’s responsible for getting that done now we may not always get it done but we want to strive for you know strive for getting everything done, and the players of our scrum team are the product owner which will be me and I’ll explain more about that later the scrum master which in this case is going to be Amit and the team members uhh scrum master and team members are kind uhh of the scrum master I’m going to include as a team member also.

Okay so this is the overall picture of how our scrum team is going to look in the structure of the of the team so, uhh product owner at the top that’s me I decide what products we’re going to start developing and uhmm I relay that information to the scrum master we talk about what products are gonna make it in what what features and stages are gonna make it into our our weekly sprint uhh so the scrum master is more sort of like a project manager who’s responsible for getting uhh the team working well with scrum facilitating the removal of any roadblocks that might be in people’s ways things that might be slowing people down bottlenecks things like that and here’s our entire scrum team so it’s total uhh a total of six people a photographer and graphic designer a graphic designer uhh product research data research PPC uhh type of perfect person uhh we have a customer service agent and we have an Amazon manager kind of utility player. uhmm and here we have various things that we may have to outsource our uhh send out to a contractor for example we don’t have a dedicated copywriter right now as part of the scrum team so we have to figure out how to work them into the team so this is the overall uhh function of how the team’s gonna work now, when we decide on a sprint so we have one-week sprints alright, and this seven days everybody descends on the tasks that are in that sprint time period and everybody is working to get those particular tasks done as quickly as possible uhmm and to completion uhmm so everybody’s responsible for that and that means there’s got to be a lot of cross talking a lot of uhh you know help me with this help me with that, uhh cross functionality you know teach people how to help you how to do your job everybody is working as a team to get this project done it’s not a one-person show for any particular tasks now you will be assigned like the project photographer will uhh of course usually be assigned for the product photography, but uhh that doesn’t mean that you can get help in certain areas that you need so uhh that’s basically the scrum team structure.

So, general overview of what scrum will look like. So, we have the product backlog which I’m responsible for keeping up on that’s all these products that we think we might want to do uhh and and then I choose which ones get moved to the Sprint backlog so these are the active products that we are working on doing and they’ll be marked in brown and I’ll show you that in a little bit on teamwork projects and from there uhh Amit and I will decide which of these stages in this this product development will be moved over into the sprint to-do lists so we’ll move a few things over here and that’s what the team is focusing on doing during that one-week period. uhmm as you’ll notice here in each sprint every 24 hours there’s what’s called the daily stand-up or the daily scrum this is basically uhmm if we were all in the same place if we were all in an office it would be a 15-minute meeting where everybody on the scrum team uhh stands up and says uhh what they’re working on what they worked on yesterday and things that are getting in your way uhmm the way what we’re gonna do it I’ll talk about a little bit a little bit later we’re gonna do it by video but I’ll about that in a second. So anyway, uhmm so then we complete everything we can in the sprint to-do list uhmm so like sprint one would be stage one of a certain product sprint two we try to do stage two or or whatever it is, and by the end each of these stages is sort of a stopping point uhmm so it’s maybe we’re waiting for the supplier at the end of stage one or we actually physically have the product at the end of stage two and all we need to do is is launched it in stage three so they’re kind of discrete stages where uhh at the end we’ll have a finished product we’ll have it launched and it’ll be awesome.

Okay so here we have a visual representation of what is going to be our digital workflow in our project management software this is kind of a modification of a traditional scrum board which some of you may recognize with the few things missing in a few changes. uhmm I only had heart-shaped post-it notes but I think it fits because we all love our products right so on the left side we have the backlogs these are going to basically be the responsibility of the product owner in this case me, and the scrum master and on the right we have the basically the responsibilities of the scrum team which is the spread to do list and the in progress uhh call the product backlog is the responsibility of me the product owner so each one of these represents a products we have three products here with three stages two stages and four stages each stage uhmm will come with a you know varying degree of subtasks within that stage basically everybody’s responsible everybody in the entire scrum team is responsible for each one of these stages. uhmm within the stage there’s going to be things specifically like product photography that one one or two people in the scrum team can do because they have kind of special skills but overall everybody is responsible for completing the stage of each product. So, whatever you can do to help anybody in the team that’s kind of the idea when I put these products in the product backlog there will be a couple of tasks assigned to a few people that are low priority kind of research tasks that we’re going to use to decide if we move them to the Sprint backlog so you’ll have some things like uhmm product data research to figure out if there’s good sales volume you know what the competition is and product differentiation research you know researching how we can improve this product those are low priority tasks that will get done whenever there’s downtime and it will help us to decide what I’m going to move into the sprint backlog. But this looks like a good these all three look like good products so this one is maybe uhh a Christmas product that’s gonna take a few months so we can’t get that one done in time so we’ll just leave that there but we want to do product number one. So, I’ll move all three stages of product number one over to the Sprint backlog and we want to do product number three so I’m gonna move all three stages all four stages a product number three. So, this is now the Sprint backlog which in our project management software will be marked with brown uhh tags so, now what is the scrum team concerned with, the scrum team is concerned with the Sprint to-do list which will be marked with green text. Whenever I decide that we are going to start on one of these products I’ll start with the first stage I’ll say okay Stage one out of this product but I think we can do that one in our one-week sprint and I think we can do stage one and two on this product because I think it’s going to move a little faster so we’ll do both of these stages now these three stages uhmm will be you know there’ll be a project for this product and it’ll have stage 1 stage 2 and stage 3 this one will be marked with a green spread to do tag and this one will be these two will be marked with brown, same thing for this for these two so you can tell what uhmm what is in the sprint to-do list and then all the subtasks under that stage are also in the sprint to-do list what you will do is you’ll go into those subtasks let’s say we’ve got a bunch of subtasks under this one right, alright so there’s a few subtasks there uhmm and this one uhh is its product photography so you know our product photographer would say ok yeah I can do that one so let’s move that over to in progress and this one is is uhh Packaging design so one of our graphic designers will grab that and we went over to sprint in progress you basically will tag it with the sprint in progress tag that is it’s pink in our project management software okay so the whole team can see that you’re working on those two things if one of their tasks in here is like is uhh generating the barcode and GS1 like I like you know they’re working on the product packaging I’m gonna help them get that GS1 barcode on so I’m gonna work on that and you can ask for help if you need help from somebody I don’t have the product yet, I don’t have the barcode or whatever it is it’s the whole team’s responsibility to complete this stage and there’s you know multiple subtasks within this stage that are assigned to different people but that’s a responsibility of everybody. Same goes for stage one of this product and stage two this this product now once this is complete in our project management software you just mark it complete and it will disappear off the list. uhmm so, we completed all these and please all these and these actually you know somebody took that one and they took through that line okay we got that done got that done you know what that’s the entire stage one of this one we’re done with that okay but oh we didn’t we didn’t do we didn’t complete this maybe we got one or two tasks done front it from it but uhh stage 1 and stage 2 from this progress still on after our week-long sprint so go okay well we couldn’t get that done that’s fine but this time so we’re starting our next sprint and I think I think we can get this one I think we can add this so stage Stage two from this product then we can complete stage one and stage two from the other product so repeat the same process uhmm as a team, That’s the idea that’s the work for a workflow process of how that’s gonna happen. So, I am going to build this product backlog and you’ll occasionally get assignments about doing some product research kind of low priority that I will move products into the sprint backlog uhmm in conversation with the scrum master which you can see marked as brown tags and then, uhmm the scrum master and I will decide which stages of product development to move into the sprint to-do list everybody is responsible for the every stage of product development but there will be subtasks within the stage that each individual person can take and mark in progress, complete, and then once all those things are complete everyone will be responsible for checking off the stage and that’s how we do a sprint.

So, me the product owner uhmm I choose which products move from the product backlog over to the active tasks or sprint backlog and I make decisions on product development and feature set so I’m kind of I’ll need feedback from the customers and from customer support about what what new products we need what products need to be changed or upgraded or, or whatever. So, this is the product backlog and as you can see they there are pre sprint stages, so, pre sprint research, pre sprint price quote, and pre sprint sample modifications and then this is something to remind me to move the list to the scrum sprint uhmm which will be part of the product there the scrum sprint backlog so basically I will keep adding these products super-awesome test product I’ll keep adding these products and these stages are used to determine if we want to move forward with the product uhh and, and move it into a sprint so you may see some tasks assigned to you for you know product research, product improvement, getting price quotes, and getting samples sent out to me, or to the to the photographer whether that’s me or Maj and uhh these are low priority tasks so these will not be uhmm these will be whenever we have downtime when we don’t have anything to do in the sprint, to-do list or we’re waiting on something or something like that. So, uhmm whenever there’s downtime we’ll work on these and once this is all done I can decide if we want to move forward with the product and then we’ll move all these, these stages over into the sprint backlog so this one’s to determine this stage determines if there’s demand this stage determines if there’s uhh profitability in the product and this stage is determining you know with the samples are quality enough that we got from the different manufacturers and which one we want to go with. Scrum master, so this will be an its responsibility is to make sure that everyone is doing scrum right quotation marks, uhmm so he’s going to uhh be removing obstacles stopping the team and helping everybody you know if they have questions about how to do daily stand-up and this will be a learning process for for me for a minute for you guys for everybody so we’ll just do the best that we can so he’s gonna consult with me about uhmm which items to move over into the sprint to-do list and things like that. Team members, team members are responsible for the Sprint and the finished product uhh this is everybody I’m including Peter in there too because he’s got some things that he he can only do uhmm and I’ll be I’m technically in there too but uhh but this is basically the team uhh so the responsibility of the team members is to work together to complete the to-do list and working together is the key thing you guys got to help each other out uhmm if somebody needs help on a task everybody try to we don’t want it a single task to slow everybody down so everybody try to help get any individual task on that you can. uhmm the features of a scrum team is that they’re cross-functional meaning like multiple people on the team can do uhh various different tasks it’s collaborative everybody’s working together and it’s self-organizing so uhh you guys work together to come up with a plan for how you want to approach the sprint to-do list uhh so you don’t have to rely on me to tell you exactly what to do you guys can kind of organize it yourself with the help of the minute scrum master and everything. so the Sprint is a one-week time period we’re going to start with one week we may make it two weeks we may make it four weeks at some point but right now we’re starting with a one-week period. So, it’s a hyper focused time period uhmm so hyper focus on completing the sprint to-do list items uhh so we want to try to complete a development stage during each sprint. So, that’s the idea hyper focused on completing the sprint to-do lists. So, this is in the uhh in the project scrum sprint and you see we have three products here and we have the stage one two and three and this is the sprint product backlog in brown and uhh the sprint to-do list here in uhh in green. So, these are the things that you would be hyper focused on working on during this time period and notice that these two have a high priority tag and this one is a medium priority so we want to be working on these two first and this one even has a due date within three days uhh of whenever I set this so this one would be probably the most important because it has a due date within it within the sprint time period. So, when you expand the sprint sprint to-do list item the green tag there’s multiple subtasks and you’ll see that people are assigned to various subtasks multiple people sometimes or in this case an individual person uhmm but basically there are some tasks where multiple people can do it in some tasks where only one person can do it, which is which is fine uhmm so the idea is when you decide to take a task you click on it and this is as Maj going in and choosing yourself say I’m gonna take this task, and then you click the tag button, and you click Add tag, and mark it as in progress. This lets us know that’s the whole team know that you are working on that task and you have assumed responsibility for that task running through it once again you can see there are two people who can take this task so you have to assign it to yourself, uhmm this is as user Maj here so Maj is assigning it to herself and choosing the tag and selecting in progress now everybody can see that that particular task is in progress all right next up, to mark an item done all you have to do is hit the check box. and that will remove it from the list uhmm for everybody to see so all you have to do is Mark it complete and once every sub task underneath like this task is marked complete then you can mark complete this task. Once a uhh once all the subtasks below stage are complete you can then mark the stage complete and it will be removed from the the list of sprint to-do items and then all we would have left is the spread backlog items and so then the next uhmm sprint we would change one of these to a sprint to-do list and so uhh it’s a responsibility of everybody on the scrum team to get to the point where we can mark this off. So, everybody is hustling to get that done and help everybody out in order to be able to check that off. uhh so this is the sprint backlog like I was saying before once we mark these off they sprint to do list then Amit and I will go through and choose which stages are going to be moved up to the next sprint and they’ll be tagged as a spread to do list and then we go through the same process. so staying organized in teamwork projects there’s three kind of different ways to do this you can get an overview of all prioritized tasks, you can get an overview of all your assigned tasks, or you can get an overview of the scrum sprint projects as a whole so in order to get a an overview of all prioritized tasks uhh you will go to the everything it’s covered up here but that’s the everything tab, on teamwork projects, and uhh will let it run through this one more time it’s a gift so it’s just doing its thing. And we’ll go back all right so you sort by priority same priority and all people make sure it’s all people so you can see everybody’s and this will show you all of the Sprint to-do list items that are marked with priority tags so you can see these priority tags at the top. So we choose one and we can go through and see all the different tasks assigned to different people you can see here that this one is assigned to Maj uhh so it’s currently in progress and that’s how we look at that now if you want to look at your personal to-do let’s go here and just change it to so this is Maj won’t work we’re acting as Maj now and we can see all the items that are assigned specifically to her uhmm or to you and if you chose your name obviously uhh so that can be a good way to see specific tasks that are already assigned to you but it doesn’t give you quite the overview as the all the sprint items then we can actually just go up over here and go to projects and we’ll go to scrum sprint, and we can see all of the projects that are part of the sprint are that are active uhmm all the all the products that are part of the active task list and then we can see the active sprint to-do list items stage one to do and then we can see all the different subtasks that are assigned to everybody and so we can help uhmm help our teammates do their work or we can look at the work that we still need to do. That’s why going to projects scrum sprint and there it is. Okay so, what do you do first what’s the hierarchy of to-do lists so uhh number one you want to do the look for things that have the high priority tag I will make sure to put the priority tags on any tasks that I assign hopefully I’ll try to and the next one if the task has a due date before the end of the current sprint so our Sprint’s are a week long so if you look on on Tuesday and you see that there’s an item that’s due on Thursday that’s within the sprint then you should probably work on that but if there’s any high priority ones uhh you know take that into account uhmm so once you’ve got the high priority and the due dates done make sure you look at the spread to-do list. uhh that’ll be the next task list that you want to go for then follow that up with medium priority uhmm you know some of the sprint to-do list items are gonna be marked with medium priority or high priority or maybe even low priority but if it has a sprint to do tag it comes before just the medium priority tag and then you go to the low priority tags and then you go to the tasked with tasks with due dates that are kind of beyond the sprint so maybe 10 days out and then just go to all other tasks so this is kind of the way that you want to approach that. all right finally the daily standup this is kind of a new thing it’s uhh uhhm I’m kind of excited about the idea of this so everybody either has a smartphone I would recommend using your smartphone uhmm if you have it or a video camera on your on your laptop or something but every day at the start of each workday so starting Sunday night my time or Monday morning your timer or whatever it is you will create a two to three minute video. uhmm I would recommend just recording it on your phone saying what you did yesterday uhh what will you do today and are there any ops obstacles in your way that uhh stopping you from doing your job. Now uhh these questions are mostly uhh supposed to be about the Sprint items the things that are in the sprint to-do list uhmm but we can also include you know housekeeping items or things that were mentioned in slack uhmm you can say you know what what will you do today you can talk about what you’re gonna do and where you might need help that might also go in number three but basically we’re trying to get everybody communicating about what they’ve been working on what they will be working on and how we can work faster and work more efficiently if you know we helped remove some of these obstacles so do that little video on your phone and then just from your phone post it right into the slack channel I will I will make uhh let’s just do it on the general now uhh I’ll make a scrum channel I’ll make a scrum channel where you can post that video every every single workday at the beginning and then you can watch everybody’s before you start work so you can see if anybody needs help. uhmm and that’s kind of the idea and I think we can really start working really efficiently and launching a lot of products and it’s gonna be really awesome so uhh it’s gonna be a learning process we may make some changes add some things subtract some things uhh or whatever but I need feedback from you guys about how we can how we can do this even better uhmm and make it an awesome way to work.

Team Training: SCRUM Hybrid Model to Launch Physical Products on Amazon

Tools Used for This Training

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