unFIX — Liberating Collaboration to create a Product Experience
And how it related to Fluid Scrum Teams
And how it is related to Fluid Scrum Teams
Many companies are looking for better ways to increase their user’s product experience. Many other companies don’t realise this is what they need to strive for.
Today’s world is about distinguishing yourself by creating unique value. A product is a vehicle to provide this value. We live in a complex world and value creation is a discovery. This requires collaboration. Breaking silos between different parts of the value stream.
The traditional setup of Scrum teams and other agile teams is often quite siloed. Especially when the product is divided into several features with Product Owners responsible for each of these features.
Companies have been looking to overcome these silos and foster collaboration between teams and also with stakeholders. One of the most used approaches is SAFe. But SAFe is more focused on delivery. Less on discovery.
Another approach is the Spotify Engineering Culture. But this approach, promoted as a mix of daily practice and an aspiration from Spotify at that time, 2017, heavily leans on the autonomy of the teams. Which has the risk of team-level-suboptimization.
A third example is LeSS, which is about grappling with a complex environment with multiple feature teams. Of the three approaches I discussed here, this comes closest to product discovery in a complex environment. But still builds upon stable small teams with clear boundaries. Which isn’t always ideal to target solving diverse complex puzzles.
The challenges with these popular scaling approaches sparked me to talk about my positive experiences with Fluid Scrum Teams, which basically is a combination of Scrum and FAST Agile. It is a larger pool of people, organizing themselves around the work at hand. As a larger group, they have the opportunity to be truly cross-functional, so that they can cover the complete product experience or value stream.
But this is an article is about unFIX. This new concept is aiming to be an answer to the demand to tackle the complete product experience and value stream. In this article, I will dive into what unFIX is and how it relates to Fluid Scrum Teams.
What is unFIX?
The unFIX site says this:
“Organization Design for Continuous Innovation and better Human Experience. Not another Agile scaling framework”. — unFIX.work
So, Unfix is an organization design. Or better, it offers the pieces to create your own organization design.
Jurgen Appelo didn’t create unFIX out of the blue. He took inspiration from many concepts and practices, like Value Stream, the Product Experience, the Spotify Engineering Culture, Dynamic Reteaming, and Team Topologies. It looks like this:
There’s a lot to unpack here. But I suggest you visit the unFIX webpage for that. Here, I will touch upon the things I find most striking. unFIX is about creating the complete value stream, or product experience. Or as Appelo put it:
“I deleted a shopping app from the phone that worked perfectly fine. But I very often had an item missing. I then had to go to the supermarket to get that missing item. Logistics made a mistake. Not the app. But I still deleted the app due to a terrible product experience”. — Jurgen Appelo on the No Nonsense Podcast
This is clarifying why unFIX assembles all people who together create the product experience in the Base. A Base should be able to solve all of its problems. If this isn’t the case, the base needs to solve this.
The Spotify Engineering Culture is a clear inspiration. “Spotify” has Tribes, autonomous cross-functional Squads, Chapters and Guilds (and many other things that I will not touch upon now). unFIX has the Base, Crews, and Forums. These are similar, but not the same.
Crews are similar to Spotify’s Squads. But to show the difference, there are two important aspects of Crews in unFIX I wish to highlight.
The first aspect is that Crews should focus on the entire Value Stream. Not on IT alone. So this includes people from Support, Finance, etc (if they play a role in that Value Stream).
Agile brought us a lot of good. For one, the software development industry recognized it should be about building the right thing, creating value. But it also brought us new challenges:
“Agile changed functional silos into horizontal silos“- Jurgen Appelo on the No Nonsense Podcast
This is why unFIX has the Value Stream Crews.
The second aspect is that Crews are time-bound to achieve a goal. They should be empowered to change themselves to respond to threats and opportunities.
The focus is on achieving objectives in an ever-changing environment. Here, Appelo was inspired by Dynamic Reteaming and the realization that teams change, so you better get good at this. There are constraints on self-organization, provided by the Governance Crew. This is the management team whose responsibility is to lead. They set the vision and purpose for the Base.
Then there’s the inspiration from Team Topologies, which aims to optimize team interactions for flow. The four topologies are:
Stream Aligned Team
Enabling Team
Complicated Subsystem Team
Platform Team
The unFIX model has Team Topologies engrained into the model. For example, the Facilitation Crew and Experience Crew in unFIX are Enabling Teams. The Value Stream Crews are Stream Aligned Teams. The Capability Crew is a Complicated Subsystem Team. In unFIX, the Platform Team is called Platform Crew.
What is NOT in unFIX?
unFIX doesn’t prescribe how teams are organized and how they create value. Every organization is different, every value stream is different, and every crew is different. unFIX is not telling organizations what works best for them to achieve their goals.
That said, unFIX underlines the importance of the complete value stream. With that, it is radically different from how many organizations implemented agile approaches. Namely merely for the IT part of the product. This obviously impacts how teams do their work.
It is not an Agile framework, it is an organization design. It is inspired by Agile, but also by many other practices, theories and designs.
unFIX is not an out of the box solution. Instead, it gives you the opportunity to build your own organization with the unFIX building blocks.
unFIX and Fluid Scrum Teams
I see many similarities between unFIX and Fluid Scrum Teams. There are two things that strike me the most:
The Value Stream / complete product experience
Both unFIX and Fluid Scrum Teams are about the complete Value Stream (or complete product experience). It is not only software and hardware. The complete experience makes or brakes the product. This is why people involved in the complete value stream need to collaborate.
In Fluid Scrum Teams, these people responsible for parts of the experience are part of the Pool of People. In unFIX, this is called the Base.
Time-bound to achieve a goal
In unFIX, Crews are time-bound. They are on a mission to get things done. When they accomplished their mission, they can embrace new missions and regroup.
In Fluid Scrum Teams, the people organize themselves based on the work at hand. Every time new topics need to be addressed, the members of the Fluid Scrum Teams organize themselves to optimize the chances to succeed with their challenges.
The larger pool of team members is stable and cohesive. They typically are more than 10 people. Maybe even up to 50. They form smaller teams each Sprint to maximize their effectiveness.
These two topics show Fluid Scrum Teams and unFIX can go hand in hand. unFIX is the organization design. Fluid Scrum Teams has the approach to complete the mission, and achieve the goal.
“unFIX is not another Agile scaling framework”
I agree with the above statement from Jurgen Appelo. unFIX is not another SAFe or LeSS. SAFe is a set of organization and workflow patterns to address product delivery with multiple teams. It comes with numerous roles, events, and practices to deliver your work according to Agile principles. LeSS has the same premise as SAFe but chooses to stay close to Scrum.
In Contrast, unFIX is a way to design your organization. It allows the people to work together, focusing on the complete value stream. unFIX also enables collaboration with customers and users. The Crews can choose their own (Agile) approach to create these products.
I have worked in a Spotify-inspired environment and I recognize many of the topics Appelo addressed to create unFIX from “Spotify”. I find it inspiring. I believe unFIX is a promising concept that can help many organizations to take the next step in creating value. It focuses on the complete value stream, collaboration and achieving objectives and not on output. All the things that really matter in our complex world.