We've talked about the importance of good inputs, and yet we don't mean that there's some kind of perfect specification that we'll write that will guarantee our success. That is the opposite of what we believe in agile principles. We think that those good inputs are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for delivering valuable product. A lot of that value comes from driving strong collaboration with those inputs that results in actionable ideas and ultimately good product that we observe out in the field. We'll start this item on good collaboration and how to achieve it, which is what we're going to talk about in this video, with another AntiPattern. You may have heard about The HIPPO problem, the highest paid person's opinion, is what HIPPO stands for. And the idea is that the team works hard, goes out, learns, has an idea, is going in and getting ready to execute it in the way that you've been learning. And yet there's some senior executive or senior person that comes in who's the highest paid person, I guess, and they will say, no, I want to do this. If there's disagreement, the idea was that the HIPPO wins in this AntiPattern. So if that's happening, the best thing you can do is stock a full bar for the HIPPO, lock the door, and just let them do their own thing. Remember, the idea here is not to create the perfect Superman or Superwoman that is always is doing the right thing, it's to create a team that's highly functional together and doing all these things together and collaborating. You will always get a better outcome from that, you'll get much more reliable outcomes from that. The HIPPO Is there, the senior people should be helping to create the agile environments that we've been describing, and then letting the team make those critical decisions, unless things are absolutely going to go off the rails. Now, so how do we drive good collaboration? Well, one really popular and highly functional tool is this user story map that was formalized and described by Jeff Patton in his book User Story Mapping. The idea is that we create this, if you remember from XP Informative Workspace where we see the whole narrative we're going after and then we're layering detail against that. Here's how a story map generally speaking is like put together in a lot of things in Agile, the idea is not that if you do it exactly this way you'll be fine and if you don't, you won't. It's that this is a general idea that lots of teams have found helpful, and you might want to give it a try. So, what I call the first stripe here is the top line narrative. And I think that the storyboarding squares that you learn to create in courses one and two are a really good fit for this. The idea is that this narrative up here is something that anybody like a HIPPO or an outside stakeholder could come in and essentially understand what parts of the user's life we're talking about here. So over time we're trying to look at the broad sweep of all the activities that the user undertakes that we're going to deal with and deliver on with our software. That's the kind of x axis here. So there's this sequence of narrative across the top. On the y axis, this is priority, so we put our highest priority stories up here in the top stripe, and this will probably roughly corresponds to the things that are on the product backlog, so stories that are not being worked on right at the moment, but are on deck as high priorities to be worked on. And you'll notice there are more stories on this stripe, and that's because if we're using an iterative model in stripes two and stripes three, well if we have an idea, or we have something we think is maybe important but not absolutely essential, we put it down here and we don't spend time detailing it out. Because the idea is well we can't sit around and write great narrative forever and expect to get a good outcome. We need to figure out what's essential, write really detailed narrative against that, execute it in software, observe it, and then rinse and repeat. This is the whole essential idea of an iterative methodology like Agile. And so, we'll discuss this in more detail when we get to deciding, but one of the most important jobs of this map is to say, what is the thinnest possible slice of narrative that we can execute and then meaningfully observe in the field? So that might be an epic story and then all the essential detail under it. But the trick is to make sure that we're not working in slices like this where we detail every functionality out and then we see. The idea is to make sure we're working in broader narrative, observable arcs that are more horizontal like this. So we'll talk more about that in deciding, but that is another really useful thing that this story map helps you drive to, and another important piece of both your learning mission and and your overall narrative collaboration. So we've looked at some AntiPatterns and some ways that you can, tools that you can use to help drive really good collaboration around this narrative.
