Part 2 of the "How to build the best Software Products" Series, brought to you by Blossom.co Tips on how to and why you build the best products with Kanban, effectively. Advantages & Benefits: 1. Continuous Delivery 2. No Estimations 3. Iterative Workflow 4. Continuous Improvement 5. Seamless Communication 6. Cycle Time 7. Reduction of Waste 8. Frequent Shipping, faster Feedback 9. No Planning Overhead, less Meetings 10. Reduced PM Overhead 11. Focus on Quality 12. Pull Principle 13. Never miss Blockers 14. Push Notifications with Integrations 15. One-click Analytics

1. Brought to you by
How to build the best Software Products
Advantages & Benefits
of Kanban for
Software Teams
Part 2

2. Benefits of Kanban for Software Teams
Seamless Communication
1 Continuous Delivery
No Estimations
Iterative Workflow
Continuous Improvement
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15Reduced PM Overhead
Cycle Time
Reduction of Waste
Frequent shipping,
faster feedback
No Planning Overhead,
less Meetings
One-click Analytics
Focus on quality
Pull Principle
Never miss Blockers
Push Notifications with
Integrations

3. The great thing about Continuous Delivery is that it
frees you up from arbitrary time boxes like Scrum
sprints.
!
Kanban does not use time-boxed iterations.
!
Every story leads to working software and ideally to a
release.
Continuous Delivery1

4. Getting estimations right is hard.
!
In Kanban you don’t measure how much you can do
within a certain period of time. You measure how long a
story needs from idea to roll out.
!
Priorities are defined depending on what’s important and
valuable for the customers, or in any aspect of the
startup.
No Estimations2

5. Kanban is based on iterative work.
!
Breaking work into small segments gives the team a
sense of progressing successfully.
Since work segments are defined small, changes during a
particular iteration preserve the timeline.
Iterative Workflow3

6. Since work segments are small the team has multiple
opportunities to give direction for course corrections
during iterations.
Continuous Improvement4

7. Visualizing work on a Kanban board is of advantage for all
team members.
!
Information gets easy to process, understand and
retain.
Seamless Communication5

8. Analyze the size of a feature and the time it took from
inception to delivery and get a good feeling about the
speed of your team.
Cycle Time6
Pro Tip
Analyzing cycle time is an evidence based technique of how long work really
took until completion. Whereas estimations are hard to get right.

9. By defining small work segments you eliminate waste in
a process and productivity goes up.
In software development & project management waste
can be:
• Defects or Bugs
• Over-production
• Over-processing
• Waiting
• Administration
Reduction of Waste7

10. With small iterative cycles and continuous
improvement you don’t need to wait until the end of a
project for customers to provide feedback.
!
As a positive side effect costs for implementing changes
stay low.
Frequent shipping, faster feedback8

11. In Kanban there’s no sprint planning.
!
When you make changes to a sprint it triggers more
planning (meetings, communication, scheduling, etc).
!
There’s no planning overhead with Kanban.
No Planning Overhead, less Meetings9

12. Reduced project management overhead because
everyone can see the board and know what’s being
worked on.
!
All stakeholders can see at a glance …
!
• who is working on what
• at what stage is somebody working on something
• what needs to be worked on next
• where the bottlenecks are
Reduced PM Overhead10

13. You can focus on quality because in Kanban there is no …
!
• pressure to fit something into a certain timebox.
• technical debt backlog.
• approving code reviews below your standard.
!
Since there’s less working against a deadline, there’s
rarely pressure to skip quality assurance steps.
Focus on quality11

14. Pull work from left to right and only pull work onto the
next stage if it has an open Work-in-Progress slot.
Stopping multi-tasking, and context switching leads to
better productivity and higher quality.
Pull Principle12
Pro Tip
Finish what you’re already working on before you take on more work.
“Stop starting, start finishing.”

15. If work is blocked for some reason, providing context in
form of text helps to understand to be able to solve the
blocker as fast as possible.
Never miss Blockers13
Pro Tip
You can mark Blossom cards as blocked via commit message.

16. Everytime something interesting happens on your
Blossom board we push changes into your favourite
instant messaging client like Slack, Flowdock or HipChat
and integrate GitHub into your feature cards.
Push Notifications with Integrations
Pro Tip
Instant messaging clients notify your team when work gets marked as
“Blocked” to get aware and to solve the blocker as fast as possible.
14

17. Tired of spending hours generating reports?
Want to see what took a long time to complete?
Need to quickly go over the team’s most recent work?
We’ve got you covered.
!
Blossom has a “one-click” analytics tab that shows cards
with high cycle time, recently shipped cards and a Time in
Process Chart.
One-click Analytics15

18. Thank you for reading!
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19. Learn more
Agile Kanban Best Practices for a Software Team