Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced pro, Agile 101 | The Card Game offers a unique perspective on product development.
Play out real-world experiences, experiment with new team structures and create novel delivery strategies.
Have fun and learn…without risking your product pipeline.
Developers, analysts, agile coaches and execs took on the Agile 101 card game challenge. Find out who struggled with resource, had too much in their sprint, and the learnings the team took back to the real world.
Learn what it’s like to be a product manager, delivery manager and developer. Set your team size, practice collaboration and put your capabilities to the test.
Get a fresh perspective by mapping your current team structure, size and priorities. See if you can beat the game or find a better way to win.
Respond to development challenges and allow team members to practice collaborative problem-solving and change management together.
Learn what it’s like to be a product manager, delivery manager and developer. Set your team size, practice collaboration and put your capabilities to the test.
See what happens if you focus on releasing new features over managing technical debt, and then fine-tune what works best. See how your current strategy stacks up against alternatives.
Detach ways of thinking about right and wrong and lean into decisions and consequences instead. Watch it transform how technical and non-technical teams coordinate and collaborate..
Emma Hopkinson-Spark
Agile development specialist and creator of Agile 101, the card game
Full details and rules can be found here
Set your team size.
The number of people playing has a big impact on whether you win or lose – in the game, and in real life. The bigger the team, the more rolls of the dice. And just like the real world, it can be more difficult to communicate and work together in a larger team. Leaner teams could have the edge.
Assign team roles.
Each team has one Product Manager and one Delivery Manager. These two respond to events and keep you on track. The rest of your team are developers who build your product and fix bugs. You’ll quickly learn what too many developers does to your process.
Build your backlog.
‘Story’ cards represent features for your product. Each card has a score that, when hit, means you get to move on to release your next feature. Events are sometimes a problem, sometimes a positive, but always a distraction, and have to be resolved to keep users and ensure long-term stability. You draw these randomly as the game goes on, how will your team respond?
Set priorities and start rolling.
To develop and release stories, and deal with events, you need to roll a twenty-sided die (a D20). Roll above the card requirements and move on to the next card. The order in which you play the cards, who rolls against each requirement and a bit of luck decides what is successful — just like real life.
“Having our CFO on the winning team was the best thing that ever happened. All of the arguments and conversations we were having about investing in a CI pipeline or what pair programming is and why we do it, they just went away. You can explain these things over and over, but experiencing it work is something else.”
“We had our real development teams play together, some of which were as many as 14 people. These teams struggled to communicate and became paralysed by large and risky product releases. Smaller teams pulled ahead and got things done. We split those larger teams in half – in the game and real life.”
“We kind of just spread Agile 101 around the business, getting people from all different types of backgrounds (tech and non-tech) to play. It changed the organisation’s relationship with software development and helped people collaborate across the board.”
The take-aways are always different, but everyone will learn something about getting products to market quicker and how to make better decisions along the way.