Darren Petersen is a Senior Technical Project Manager at Lullabot. He’s also incredibly knowledgeable about Agile. In this interview Darren and I discuss how Agile has been implemented at Lullabot. We dig into what works, what doesn’t, why he moved away from Story Points and all, and how Lullabot has been able to get dedicated teams in place.

Note: During the interview Darren and I have a brief conversation about why it makes no sense to force yourself into the

As a (some user)

I want to (some action)

so I can (some benefit)

format just for the sake of using it. I promised to get him an official answer. You can find that here:

SHOW NOTES

00:08 Interview Begins

00:47 Background on Lullabot

01:33 Managing 50 distributed team members

03:04 Using social media tools to stay connected with remote staff

05:57 Using Agile at Lullabot for client work

12:02 Making the case for some upfront planning, before using Agile during Development

12:50 Taking on the cost of teaching Agile to the client (who doesn’t care about Agile)

14:22 The way Lullabot sets up Teams to use Agile for client work

15:22 How can a digital agency maintain the business with dedicated teams

20:35 How dedicated teams impact the staff members morale and performance at Lullabot

23:27 Teaching customers to write decent User Stories

28:07 Should you force yourself into a User Story format when it doesn’t make sense? *

29:32 Why Darren doesn’t like using Story Points

33:00 How did Darren get so deep with Agile and what drives him to keep learning about it

36:19 Getting in touch with Darren

37:01 Interview Ends

CONTACTING DARREN

Twitter https://twitter.com/dsayswhat

Email: [email protected]

About: https://www.lullabot.com/about/darren-petersen

Lullabot https://www.lullabot.com

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST

User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn http://amzn.to/2vKv4JI

Troy Magennis & Focused Objective http://focusedobjective.com

User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton http://amzn.to/2wckyOg

Agile Manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org