BCS SPA2017

How To Train Your HiPPO

How To Train Your HiPPO

Workshop (75 mins)

Abstract

Have you noticed the impact when someone more senior in your organisation shares their opinion? Meet the HiPPO: the Highest Paid Person's Opinion. Sometimes it's subtle and unintended. Other times it's more direct and intentional. Either way, the HiPPO is a dangerous animal in Product Management.

When we allow the HiPPO to drive decision-making we hide critical assumptions. Value and urgency is buried. MVP scope becomes massive. Roadmap dates become commitments. Options get prematurely closed down and the chances of discovering black swans is reduced. Indeed, the HiPPO is one of the most dangerous animals to let stomp around in Product Management.

Whilst the HiPPO likes to be in charge, none of us want to be responsible for developing products that nobody wants. How can we help the HiPPO to help themselves?

This workshop is a chance to learn and practice a few simple techniques for training the HiPPOs in your organisation.

Audience background

Anyone working in product development

Benefits of participating

Understand why the HiPPO is so dangerous in product development
Five techniques to help with training your HiPPO
Try out 5 useful techniques that helps with training your HIPPO

Materials provided

Hand outs explaining 5 techniques

Process

See next section

Detailed timetable

Running order:

1. What is the �HiPPO� and why is it dangerous? (10 mins)
Start with a few examples to illustrate the impact that the HiPPO has. We do this in order to establish the �WHY� by highlighting the problem/pattern and giving it a name so that it is easier to identify and talk about.

2. Swap HiPPO stories (5 mins):
In groups of two, share one or two of your own experiences of HiPPO-driven decision making. In this part we want them to self-identify instances where they have observed HiPPO-effect. We need them to be mindful of their own context and the pain of HiPPO-driven decisions as we go into the next section.

3. Present (15 mins):
In this section we go through some practices that can help alleviate and minimise the impact of HiPPO.

4. Practice 5 techniques (30 mins):
In pairs, we look at two scenarios where a few HiPPO-driven decisions tend to show up.
(We may use different scenarios for the purpose of this workshop but some scenarios we used previously were; dictated MVP, committed date on product roadmap, Hippo raising a "must have" feature with no explanation)
Present the first HiPPO-event scenario.
Spend 5 minutes brainstorming ideas for how you can apply a couple of the 5 techniques: what you could do, say or suggest that would help improve the decision. Write your ideas down on sticky notes.
Repeat the same for the second HiPPO-event scenario.

5. Debrief (10 mins)
Spend a few minutes in pairs jotting down what you learned.
Then debrief with the wider group at your tables and capture learnings on a flipchart.

6. Conclusion (5 mins)
We wrap up and conclude by summarising the 5 techniques.

Outputs

Summary

History

This is a new workshop, I have presented the 5 techniques previously at ACE last year. I am turning this into a workshop this year.

Presenters

  1. Ozlem Yuce
    Agile At Heart Ltd.