Maarten Dalmijn

Maarten Dalmijn introduced Scrum to the fastest-growing start-up in the Netherlands. He helped the start-up to scale up its Product Management and delivery process across multiple tech offices around the globe after the company secured a 22$m series A funding round. He is an ambassador and editor at Serious Scrum, the largest publication on Medium about Scrum. He has written more than 150 best-practice articles on Product Management, Agile, and Scrum. He is currently the Head of Product at Rodeo.

Title of presentation: Beating the Feature Factory.

Most companies working with Scrum end up producing Feature Factories, focused on shipping new features. The central belief underpinning the Feature Factory is that all proposed features are guaranteed to deliver value. When organizations are confident all features on the roadmap are valuable, the main challenge then becomes to get them out of the door quickly and reliably. Feature Factories may seem productive — they churn out a lot of features after all! But features are shipped without any assurance of delivering value to customers and the business. What should we be doing instead? In this talk, Maarten will discuss:

  1. Why Scrum often produces Feature Factories.
  2. What are the most common signs that you are working in a Feature Factory are.
  3. What obstacles do you need to overcome to move away from the Feature Factory and concrete ways on how to do so.
15:00 - 15:45

TeleSoftas Track

Beating the Feature Factory

Most companies working with Scrum end up producing Feature Factories, focused on shipping new features. The central belief underpinning the Feature Factory is that all proposed features are guaranteed to deliver value. When organizations are confident all features on the roadmap are valuable, the main challenge then becomes to get them out of the door quickly and reliably. Feature Factories may seem productive — they churn out a lot of features after all! But features are shipped without any assurance of delivering value to customers and the business. What should we be doing instead? In this talk, Maarten will discuss:

  1. Why Scrum often produces Feature Factories.
  2. What are the most common signs that you are working in a Feature Factory are.
  3. What obstacles do you need to overcome to move away from the Feature Factory and concrete ways on how to do so.