Do you ever wonder how successful companies evolve and grow their products with fast and consistent success? The answer is agile!
Agile is a mindset that you can adopt in order to constantly release products, learn, and iterate.
Not only is agile an important mindset to adopt within your business, it’s also helpful adopting within your own personal life. After all, agile is just a methodology you can use to stay flexible through constant and quick iterations to help you learn, evolve, and grow to meet your goals.
There are times in life and in business where your end goal seems so far away, so nebulous, and very difficult to achieve. Consider the agile mindset as a guide to help you steer through the maze and make the decisions necessary to work your way toward your goal with speed and purpose by breaking up large chunks of work into smaller, manageable, and releasable chunks.
The pillars of the agile mindset act as a guide to help you achieve great product development skills by moving quickly and constantly evolving. All four pillars emphasize agility and flexibility over strict rules and rigid, time-sucking processes. But agile doesn’t exist just so you can stick to the old ways, abandon all structure, and become trigger-happy, chaotic loons who throw spaghetti on the wall and hope something sticks.
There still is a thoughtful and purposeful method to agile that empowers you to build good products. It allows you to prioritize customer needs, speed, learning, and iteration above all else, unlocking the ability to quickly develop the right products.
This pillar is all about the internal interactions made within your teams. It may seem obvious, but listening to, communicating with, and empowering your team members should be held above following strict processes and using tools just because they’ve been used in the past. Tools and processes that slow you down or get in the way of your team members feeling valued should be re-evaluated or ignored.
The products and features you release should work and be usable, and dare I say, be valuable above all else. After all, you’re trying to make your businesses successful and a great way to do that is by building good products that customers want to buy and will continue buying.
It’s important to focus on continually releasing features so you can constantly test the market and make improvements as you go. Afterall, technology, the market, and your customer’s needs are always evolving. You can’t (and shouldn’t) build perfectly-polished and shiny features with all the bells and whistles right out the gate.
You need to move faster because the market is moving fast! You can speed up product development by removing the need for perfect documentation before development. The goal here is to quickly release and then iterate on it as you go. Therefore, documentation does not need to be perfect from the jump.
Similar to the point above, just as you want to quickly develop features so you can test them in the market, you want to do the same with brand new products for customers. Instead of focusing on refinement and contracts before anything is even built, you want to collaborate with the customer and keep them involved in the product process so you ensure you’re building the right thing.
This can look like looping them in throughout the development cycle via customer interviews, prototyping reviews, and UI test sessions. Trying to define the product in a contract before anything is developed or tested is a sure fire way of writing yourself into a corner and ending up with a product that the customer doesn’t even want.
The late Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are nothing; planning is everything” and the same is true with the agile mindset. It’s far more important to be flexible and follow customer and market feedback than it is to make a plan on day one and stick to it until the very end regardless of what is happening outside.
Far too many things change like technology, laws, industry standards, etc. for you to not be flexible with your plans. So keep planning, but don’t stay chained to a plan just because it was written down and agreed upon yesterday. Your plans should change as you learn more and test your product with actual customers.
In order to stay flexible and move quickly, you have to be willing to make mistakes. In order to do so at scale in a business, you have to ensure everyone on your team has the psychological safety and the freedom to fail so that no one is afraid to bring up new ideas or develop the wrong thing.
Some ways you can increase psychological safety within teams is to talk over a new feature together and how you’re going to apply the agile mindset toward developing it. You can also use retrospectives to discuss a recent or past mistake in order to communicate the acceptance of mistakes and how testing, learning, and iteration is all a byproduct of agile.
Seemingly silly, I do think it’s helpful to have non-work related icebreaker activities before a discussion like this is had with the team. Fun games or team-building activities can be helpful in growing the connection between team members and building that trust.
From there, it’s much easier to broach the subject of a recent opportunity for growth and improvement. As a team, you can present a product problem and together, you can discuss what steps were taken to make that decision and then what steps need to be taken to iterate on the product and improve it.
By involving the team in this way, you not only establish shared responsibility and investment in the overall product but you also reiterate the agile process.
At this point, you may be asking why do this at all? Why quickly and incrementally deliver products in order to maximize value? Couldn’t you just go heads down for a few months and release one perfect product with all the bells and whistles customers want and then move on to the next thing?
You want to deliver a product as fast as possible to get it in the hands of users to not only start getting their feedback on the product, but to also unblock customers from using vital aspects of your product. Plus, through quickly releasing and testing in the market, you can learn if it is or isn’t viable in the next release.
Maybe you learn that customers are perfectly content with email and password login and you don’t even need to support Google SSO. That would save you a ton of wasted time and resources that could now be spent better improving other features.
I am a big champion of product owning the “why” and engineering owning the “how” because both teams can collaborate on developing the best possible product by leveraging their expertise within their own fields. Product doesn’t spend all day in the code and engineering doesn’t spend all day talking to customers. I find that this power coupling is extremely valuable in developing successful products because it encourages innovation.
Everyone has a voice and therefore, everyone has investment and responsibility in developing the best possible product. Leading product conversations by focusing on the why and collaborating with design and engineering also fosters a culture of experimentation and eliminates the prescriptive and rigid one-sided development process that is so common in feature factory orgs..
Plus, with more investment in the product from other teams, everyone has more of a shared responsibility in the product’s success which increases the level of psychological safety and camaraderie. As product and engineering collaborate together, you’ll foster an environment where you will receive tons more feedback, new ideas, and more.
Confluence and Jira are great tools to use for agile software development like scrum and Kanban. Being able to easily organize work by releasable epics is a great way for your product team to stay on top of scope creep and understand release dates while also allowing engineering to understand what needs to be developed in order to consider a body of work done.
Within Jira and Confluence, product and engineering can collaborate together to refine and scope projects with the agile mindset in place to easily determine the MVP, set and communicate dates, and also keep a healthy backlog in place so the team can constantly refine and develop new features quickly.
Not every product or feature is going to be perfect upon first release (nor should it). Building and iterating on products is an ongoing process in order to keep up with ever-evolving markets and technologies. With an agile mindset, you’re saying no to the idea of hiding away for months and months “perfecting” a product, falling out of touch with the market, and realizing that you spent a ton of time developing features you don’t need.
Instead, you want to keep up with the ever-changing market and technologies by releasing quickly and getting feedback so we can constantly improve and stay up to speed. Getting your product or feature into the hands of your target user as fast as possible helps you collect that feedback and stay current with evolving needs so you can avoid building the wrong products and wasting resources. The agile mindset is the thought process that can help you achieve this type of successful and fast product development.
Not only will the agile mindset help you quickly and continuously build and improve on products, it will also help strengthen teams, improve collaboration, and increase responsibility for product success across your organization.
Featured image source: IconScout
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