Scrum in Action: Stories from the Trenches - Scrum and Product Discovery in a Small Business

In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, host Dave West chats with PST Felipe Andrade about the application of Scrum in non-traditional product development contexts, such as small businesses. Felipe shares his experience of implementing agile principles in a barbershop/pub setting, emphasizing cultural fit and continuous improvement. He shares his experience with starting and growing a bar and barbershop business, highlighting the importance of understanding customer needs and experimentation in business decision-making using product discovery and validation techniques. He emphasizes the versatility of Scrum and its potential to be applied in various industries and contexts.

Transcript

Lindsay Velecina  0:03  
Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Dave West  0:20  
Hello, and welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host, Dave West, CEO here@scrum.org. Today's podcast is a pretty special one. It's focused on a really fun and interesting topic of using Scrum outside of traditional product or software development spaces. So scrum in the wet in the in the wild as it were, and to talk about this topic we're lucky to have join us today. Felipe Andrade is a professional scrum trainer actually is from Brazil, but actually became a trainer whilst living in New Zealand, which is the other side of the world, obviously, and now has moved to the UK and to London. Wow, that's a lot of interesting travel for sure. So we could spend all day talking about that, but instead, welcome to the podcast. Lupe.

Felipe Andrade  1:18  
Glad to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Dave West  1:22  
Oh, great to have you. So first, I think we should kick off telling our listeners a little bit about you, and your history and your experience. And I'm sure some of those fabulous locations would will make it even more interesting for our listeners.

Felipe Andrade  1:39  
Good. Sounds good. So again, my name is Philippe. I'm a professional scrum trainer. Also an Agile coach and OKRs coach consultant, started my career in Brazil, where I'm originally from from Rio. Then I went to New Zealand, I lived there for about eight years, then I went back to Brazil to open this business. And then I came to London, and here I am. I'm a bit lost. I'm a bit everywhere. But that's fine.

Dave West  2:07  
You are a traveler of the world, I think. I think that's super exciting. And wish I had as much confidence as you to move to all those fantastic places. Okay, so let's lean into the topic, right? Um, you know, talking about using Scrum outside or traditional product, or software development. So what I remember when we set this up was there was a session at the professional scrum trainer face to face in London, where you talked about I think the title of the session was how agile saved my small business. And that's what got my radar, my scanner working and I was really, really interested. Do you want to share with our listeners a little bit about that session and that context?

Felipe Andrade  2:53  
Yeah, sure. So I came to to the face to face in London, which was a great experience to meet the PST is from here. And I wanted to share this story, the story of how I've used agile not only Scrum, but product practices and many other things to help and save my pub and barber shop. So I'll give you a background of the story, of course, cuz I've worked with software development for about 15 years. So when I completed 15 years, I thought that I had enough of it. And to be honest, I thought, Okay, I'm tired of seeing the same problems in the same company in different companies. So I thought maybe I'll try something different. But I needed a break. So I went to Brazil, primarily to take a break, to relax, to reconnect with family, and etc. And it was all going well, until I had this haircut with my friend, which happened to be a very skewed Barber. And he was like, Oh, I I'm opening your business, thinking about opening in business, but I need investment etcetera. As I wanted to try something different. At least to try I thought, okay, maybe that's, that's my way in. And then I agreed, and we just embarked on this journey to create a business. So his idea was to create a barber shop, right? But I thought that was too basic. I mean, I saw too many barber shops in my city already. So I wanted to create something different. I thought, I don't want to create just a barber shop. I want to create something else. Almost like an experience, right? So I started trying to visualize what of what that could be. And we got to this crazy idea of a pub and the barbershop there integrated. So the idea is you would go for a haircut, you would stay for cocktails pretty much. And yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if you want to address anything about this. So follow

Dave West  4:59  
up Well hang on. So let me just get this right you, you've kind of had your time talking to software to organizations doing software delivery and product development. And you were like, the time for a change. So you went back to Brazil to connect with family and, and have a break. And of course, being the inquisitive, passionate, interested person that you were, you got talking to your friend who happened to be a barber about this business idea. And then you got involved with creating this new entity, this new business that was a bar, and a barber shop is sort of an integrated experience, where come for a haircut, stay for cocktails, you know, that that kind of idea. And that's super interesting. And you've got no experience starting bars, or barber shops, right? So

Felipe Andrade  5:51  
neither of those. And also, I had no interest of becoming a bar or barbershop manager. So what I really wanted to do was to help my friend to create this business. And that would disappear. Now I will keep in touch, but he would drive things, right. So that's what I did. So I spent two months I actually hired some expensive consultants and architects and all of that, to create the perfect business plan the perfect business, right. So spent two, two and a half months building the barbershop and the and the pub, of course. And then I opened the barber shop. But I still felt like I needed a break. So I can add the keys to my business partner. And I went on another journey on another trip. I spent three months in Europe. But that didn't work out very well.

Dave West  6:49  
So what happens? So the barber shop collapsed? What what what know what happened whilst you're away for three months in Europe? So

Felipe Andrade  6:57  
what happened is, we had a, as I say, the perfect, supposedly perfect business plan, right. So we had expected revenue growth we had even actions that we could take if things weren't going as we planned. And we just had to follow it supposedly. So we did for three months. And all we saw was the business was straining now, we started very weak by still like, it's the novelty people would come in, etcetera. From the second month, we saw our numbers going down, the third, it continued to go down, we started losing people really the barbers, because they're working on commission, they started leaving to more popular barbershops, because of course, one thing that the business plan didn't anticipate was the changes that would happen throughout that period. Right. So for example, we had increased competition, to barber shops open at the same time, close to us. We had this idea of bringing a very specific offering of cocktails to our city. After the first month, the pubs around us started selling the same cocktails. So we didn't have a way I would say, to react to those changes. For the first three or four months, we were just trying to follow the business plan. And this consultant would just say, I just need patience, have small business take time to work and et cetera. But really what the numbers were saying, what the trend was saying is that we weren't going to collapse if we kept going that way. So I decided to go back started, decided to interrupt my trip, and go back and try to help the business out of this situation. Okay,

Dave West  8:48  
so you obviously I'm, I'm a lean startup kind of guy. So I believe in sort of product, problem fit, and then product market fit. So you're the customers that actually came enjoy the experience, right? They, I mean, obviously you know that I'm bored. So I've not been to a barber shop since 90. I think 92 or three was the last time I went to get my haircut, which is you know, probably before many of our listeners were born. Yeah, but I Yeah, so but you but I assumed that the people went in there to get their hair cut and and have a have a have a drink, got some value out of it and enjoyed it. So you, you had you had a product that people wanted, right? You just couldn't find product market fit was you couldn't get the business wasn't growing. We weren't getting repeat customers. We weren't getting people come back that kind of problem. Was that was that the essence of the problem?

Felipe Andrade  9:46  
Yes, yes. I think that that was it. So again, the the business plan did all the business plans they assumed that I think they're always made on I'm optimistic without an optimistic view of the world. So we thought that, of course, like if you see the pictures are our pub in a barber shop is really, really pretty. We it's a thematic place, right? So we try to make it like a theme park for adults that want you to try to get them Barbara, sorry, barbershop services, and the cocktails as well. So, but that wasn't enough, you know, like, there was something missing, there was something wrong. We just couldn't figure out, we paid more marketing companies, we changed twice the marketing agencies that we used, we changed some of the offerings. But for somehow, some reason, it wasn't landing, it wasn't growing. And that's when I went back. And I thought, Look, I have limited resources, limited amount of money, and I need to make this work before I go bankrupt. So I need to make a very smart use of the money of the time I have left. And then I thought, oh, there's something that I often use that can probably help me with that. And that was the whole idea of using seeing my business as a product, right seeing as a business as a vehicle of to deliver value to our customers, which meant that from that moment on the customer or the users, they will be at the front of all the decisions I made. So pretty much I put away the business plan and started going to more discovery mode, trying to understand what is wrong with our business? And what are what is the cheapest way for me to figure out what ideas will take us away or take us out of this situation. And that that's about the discovery and validation techniques that we have employed. So we started like, observing talking to customers, we formed customer groups, VIP customers and et cetera. And we started collecting a lot of feedback from those conversations. And we pretty much figured out things that we had no idea to be honest, that the data itself didn't tell us right. So I would say that the biggest finding, which was shocking was that many men, many people that use the barbershop, they give us feedback that cocktails are not for men. So pretty much. There's this culture, at least in my city, which is of course we we've built the menu, the cocktail menu, targeted to our target audience, right. So we had lots of strong drinks with whiskey, we had lots of Negronis, and all of that. But there was this interesting thing in Brazil, where you realize that men don't drink cocktail. So people were just there for the beers. So that was a major flaw in our business plan, right? We thought that we could create this demand. But we were wrong, we were pretty much wrong.

Dave West  13:18  
So so, you know, discovery and validation is all about finding hypothesis, testing those hypotheses in the cheapest, most economical way possible, learning from that test, re changing hypothesis, you know, reframing your understanding of the problem and the customer in the situation and experimenting continuously and getting that feedback. And that's what you did, you did it with, you know, peer group created groups, you interviewed people you observed you looked, you know, you obviously pull people off the street and ask them questions, you talk to the people that work there. Is that how it really worked?

Felipe Andrade  13:56  
Yes, yes, there was. And I will say, so again, looking, looking at the business as a product really helped us to understand what were what were our features, right. So we started seeing the services as features. And we started trying to understand how we can optimize the value that those features deliver. So for example, hair cut is a feature, right? So do we have data to say if this feature is actually generating value for customers and for us as a business? So we started having that mindset of trying to identify what was wrong through discovery and etc, but not jumping straight into conclusions. So we had, we've applied this idea of experiment before commitment. So before we would fully commit again, remember, I had only a little money, I could not I cannot spend a lot of money on things that wouldn't. That wouldn't help me that wouldn't help the permanent barber shop. So we started but then I thought So, is this possible even? I mean, I've done quite a bit of that with software. Right. So we talk about MVPs. We talk about feature fake and all of that. But my question was, can I do something similar to a pub in a barber shop? And the idea is, that is, definitely, I can. So I'll just give you one example. So I jumped a few steps. By the way, one of the things I did was to involve the whole team in this sort of discussion, right? I think their input was very valuable. They were facing the customers on a daily basis. Right. So one of the girls, one of the bartenders, she came to me one of those meetings and said, Look, why don't we do karaoke nights? And then I thought, that's not really our thing. Because I don't know we are more like, on speakeasy style. We have a barber shop here. I'm not sure if that's gonna fly, by OSA. Okay. Anyway, let's try it. Let's try. Right. So first thing, let's start asking people. So when people come here, let's ask them, would you be interested to come to a karaoke night? That we don't even know if we're gonna run yet? So we gather people interested, and we had great acceptance of the idea. For some reason, people were like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna bring my, my wife and etc. And we had enough data to give us confidence that this was a good idea. But I was still not convinced. And that was more like, because I didn't deal recently. But I thought, Okay, let's go with it. And then, but I say, I'm not gonna buy any equipment. Let's hire a karaoke machine. Right? That's the next step. And then we hired we announced this event, which was the karaoke night, we hired this machine. And oh, man, that was the best night since our opening. So we saw lots of drinks. People were having fun. I was like, Oh, shit, she was right. Sorry. And then. And then I, I, I said, Okay, let's, let's do it a couple of times more, just to make sure that we're not wasting our time. That's not a temporary thing, right? So we did two other nights, they were pretty great. And then I thought, Okay, now we're going to buy the equipment to maximize profits, right? Because those karaoke nights, they machines, they cost a lot of money. So they were eating our profits. But anyway, so just this idea of providing of doing experimentation really helped me save more money, because I could just go for the whole karaoke system, and etcetera. But if that didn't work, what I was going to do, I'll probably throw my money away.

Dave West  17:55  
I mean, that happens all the time, right? And software development in particular, you end up building this elaborate architecture, this well defined product feature that's complete in all essence, yeah, error handling data management, all this stuff, you release it, and nobody uses it. And you're like, well, well, I know that was. So what you're describing, I think, is this idea of doing the most economic the cheapest thing possible to demonstrate the value and then not even believing when people say yes, when they click on the button, fair enough, but then let's see regular clicking on that button before we invest in, in actually building the complete architecture, etc.

Felipe Andrade  18:43  
Yeah, definitely. And I think the whole you know, that mom test when they say, you should never ask your mom if a business idea is a good idea, because she's always gonna say, so I failed that test very terribly with a whole Pavan barbershop. Because I asked my before deciding to jumping into it. I asked my mum, I asked my my parents, we asked our friends, and they all said yes. Which also brings me to the, to another topic, which is around the confidence of those signals that you get, right, the strength of those signals, I would say, because we also had a bad case I just told you about the nice. The good thing, the good experiment, we had another one, which was pretty bad. So someone suggested in when we collected feedback, that we could have like a poker table, right? So just so you know, poker is legal in Brazil, it's considered a sport. So we thought, okay, there's no other places in our city that has poker tables. We could do that. Right. So from that feedback, we ran a campaign, a paid ads campaign on Instagram, Facebook, asking people to sub ascribe to this poker tournament that we would run. And we, we had lots of people, we didn't charge for it, but we had lots of people subscribed. And based on that, I made the decision to buy a poker table. And for some reason, when we were inaugurated, sorry, when we've opened the poker table, when we made it public, no one showed up. I mean, maybe four people showed up out of the, I don't know, 200 300 that subscribed. And then on the subsequent weeks, even though we did a lot of marketing, we were still struggling to get a full table. And looking back, now, I've learned that you need to be very careful on how you do those experiments, or validations. Because there was much friction on just clicking a button and saying, Yes, I'm interested in poker, right? It's way harder to actually go live your house go to a place to play poker. So when you do those experiments, you need to make sure that you really trust the data before you, you make big decisions, right before you will make full big commitment. So So yeah,

Dave West  21:12  
and I think what you're highlighting is ultimately the friction to stop somebody from using the feature needs to be understood. And you have to really understand what is friction, as opposed to desire, you know, when one outweighs the other, then you're in trouble when you either in a positive situation when the desire outweighs the friction, or a negative situation of friction outweighs the desire to do something, or the necessity to do something, if it's, you know, a software system, etc. Okay, so this idea of breaking things down into small chunks of risk, delivering frequently learning, observing, being very mindful of the signals that they're getting back. But I think there's another thing that you said, which I just want to lean into briefly. You involve the whole team, it wasn't just you and your business partner, you know, having fabulous ideas in the back of the, you know, the barber shop and then executing, you involve the whole team. You want to talk a little bit more about that for a second. Yeah,

Felipe Andrade  22:16  
sure. So one thing to note, though, as soon as I get got back, my partner decided to leave. Oh, so yeah, he was supposed to run the place, right. But he had some personnel issues. And he decided to just leave and go back to his previous job, which is okay, I understood. But then I, again, I was in that situation where now I need to be the manager, and the barbershop manager. So the first thing I did when I actually was the only one driving the business was to try and bring people back to the wire, right? So what's our mission? Like, why we're here to do? What's our vision? Where do we want to go? Do we always want to be just on that spot, we want to expand maybe become a franchise, I had dreams, you know, like, I want to share, I wanted people to share those dreams as well. And of course, I looked at the values highly influenced by agile and by the scrum values, right, the idea of self managing teams, the idea of transparency, the idea of commitment, focus, etc. And unfortunately, one of the hard lessons I had was that culture, really, it starts at the door. It starts with a recruitment, right? So some people unfortunately, didn't fit into this culture. And unfortunately, I had to let them go, because it only takes one or two people to really damage, especially when we're talking about small teams, they really can damage the environment. So that's what I did. I tried to bring people back of course, I wasn't lecturing them, or agile or whatever. I was just observing behaviors. I was trying to exert those behaviors myself as being a servant leader, right? So there were many nights I went to the bar and I did the dishes, or I talked to people they do have of being part of a team, right? And then luckily, I was able to identify the people that could form a good team. And from there on, we started working on this model, which is based on screen pretty much so we started having cadences. Right, so we started having month long sprints, where we would define a goal. Our goal were, they were all focused on outcomes. So they weren't, they weren't about completing features. Again, they weren't about implementing a new service and etc. We would look always at the data. So one framework that helps us helped us a lot to formulate those goals was OKRs. Although I have OKRs for for the company level for a year, but that's another topic I would say, for the team every month, we would think, what's our goal? What's our objectives? So for example, one of our first goals was to become the new talk of the town, right? become recognized as a great bar. And how are we going to measure that, and the idea was, I don't know we're gonna have 100 new customer, as we were going to sell 200 more cocktails, we were going to have five new positive reviews on Google. So based on those on that objective, or on that sprint objective, we would formulate experiments that will retry throughout the month, to make sure that we are achieving that are not always with the open mind. That doesn't mean because we've selected to the sprint that this will actually be beneficial for us, we're going to try it in the least the cheapest way. And if we figure out this not useful, we're going to throw it away and try something else. And they're really, really helped us. Again, some people when I when I told my friends, especially from the from it that we were doing Scrum in our bar, one of them asked doesn't mean I need to raise a JIRA ticket to have a haircut. And I was like, No, it's not that. And it's a very, but I think it's a fair point to highlight here. We started using Scrum, for continuous improvement, not for the bar operation the day to day operations. Because I mean, like this guys are experienced, they have already lots of processes, they have very structured ways, right to prepare the cocktails to serve the cocktails to deal with storage, and etc. So I didn't want to add any overhead. I didn't want to add any waste. But again, this continuous improvement cycle, this feedback loop was very important to

Dave West  27:05  
us. And that's really, because obviously, improving the outcomes for the bar for the product. That is the bar is a complex problem. Actually, once somebody's in the bar, we hope not, we hope that it's not that complex at all. We hope it's actually pretty, pretty routine. And that would benefit from a very different, you know, process model in a more probably more lean, probably more traditional plan, plan base, which is exactly what you're doing checklists, and you know, I've cleaned the bathroom every every X number of hours or whatever. Which makes a lot of sense. So, okay, now, I know, we only we could talk about this all day. Interesting. It's such an interesting topic. So I unfortunately have to pull, pull these threads together and finish this off. So now you moved. Back moved to the UK, your bars still operating? Is it doing? Okay, now? Is it? Have you sort of instilled this culture though it's just continuously improving, experimenting, the team that's there is sort of taken ownership of this, this approach to tell us a little about what's happening now. Lupe? Yeah, sure.

Felipe Andrade  28:23  
So yes, we started seeing improvements. After the second month, we started implementing this changes. It's now part of our culture, right. And also, I knew I wasn't gonna stay around for too long. So I really tried to instill this self management culture. And of course, I had to select the right people to be part of my team to make that possible, especially when we talk about hospitality, right? It's not, it's not something simple is not everyone that that that's equipped with the with the traits really, to follow that culture. But I was very lucky, I assemble a very, very good team. And now they're taking care of the bar. I have two managers, two bar managers. They're both in the same position. They all they both share the load. And we talk every week, pretty much. So we have weekly catch ups. We still have a board where we look into the experiments we're trying to do we look at the numbers. So it's pretty much the same thing. But now I'm doing that remotely. I talk with them on Saturdays pretty much and it's been it's been working great. Thankfully, the bar actually expanded to overcome the barbershop so I've decided to take the barbershop away from the from the place we are right now. I'm taking the barber shop to a different place. One of the things we found out throughout discovery, and there was a big one is because the place the store place wasn't suitable for for barbershop because it was hidden. It did not have easy access and et cetera. And it no matter what we did, it wasn't going to work. So that was the most expensive. This is the most expensive experiment I'm doing so far. Our hypothesis is that bringing the barber shop to street from place, a place, there's more more exposed is going to increase our numbers. So that's what we're doing right now. I'm in the midst midst of construction work, and also dealing with a bar. And I'm also here in London. So yeah, getting a bit crazy at the moment, but it's going well.

Dave West  30:37  
Well, I'm I'm super excited to hear the journey hopefully, better come back in any years time. I I do think that opening a lady's hairdressers or salon, I guess you call that with cocktails based on my wife's visits. They seem to be very long. I think she would enjoy a cocktail or two during that during her process. But his idea, maybe that's something we can we can brainstorm later. It's and for the people, for our listeners, what's the name of the of the bar? Because they may be in Rio? It's in Rio, right? Yeah,

Felipe Andrade  31:15  
it's it's in a city. In real in the real estate. It's called MCI, it's a big city. And the name of the bar is London, London pub and barbershop. Funnily enough, the city I live in now wasn't intentional. I didn't want to live in London before. I don't know I'm hearing on that

Dave West  31:35  
serendipity. Right. Yeah. That sounds excellent. Well, thank you for taking the time. And talking about the use of Scrum, very far away from the traditional product and software world. I think there's many amazing parallels that we can, that we can take to our day to day lives when when we're when we're faced with a complex problem. So thanks for taking the time out today. And, and and sharing your experiences. Thank

Felipe Andrade  32:05  
you very much for hosting me. It was amazing talking to you. Great.

Dave West  32:10  
So and thank you for our listeners for listening today to the scrum.org community podcast. Hopefully you liked what you heard today. If you do please subscribe share with your friends and, and family. And obviously if you're in Brazil, that looks like a fantastic bar that you should visit and talk to them about how they can better refine their backlogs and stay on track for their for their product goals. So I'm lucky enough to live a lot of these kinds of conversations on our podcast channel. So if you're interested in listening and hearing about professional scrub, product thinking and of course agile. Please come back for more. Thanks for your time. I'm your host Dave West Scrum On!