We Are Agile! Maybe.

Startup Stories at it's best. Many people want to - only a few manage to be.

When you talk to developers and product managers in startups then you will hear many buzzwords (also in marketing but today it’s about tech ;) ). They are used daily, some are made up some are existing. We like to use them doesn’t matter if you actually understand what you are saying.

Who Doesn't Want To Be Agile?

One of my favourites is the word „agile“. Everyone knows what agile supposed to mean, but most of the people are not sticking to the actual agile process. I saw often that they try hard but then get trapped in company politics, too long arguments with managers or just in discussions with people who apparently know better but in the end, they don’t. What is happening then is that the decision-making process already breaks the agile process.

An Example

In a company I worked with different teams, including my own. We came up with an idea to test that would take two days of development and implementation. In the end, it was not done. Why was that? First, we needed some design. Designers were overloaded and don’t have time to prioritize. So you decide to stick to the brand of course but build an easy MVP. An MVP doesn’t need to be super beautiful in terms of code, it just works for a quick test before you iterate further. So my team builds a minimum viable product that has to be deployed in another team's code base. And here, shit hits the fan. That teams first comment was that the code was not what they expect as a standard code. The design is also not how they would do it. (My immediate thoughts were “did I ask for an opinion?”. This put us in an endless loop of meetings and arguments about how an MVP should look - but yeah we are agile.

"Agile is a time-boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end."*

For creating a successful product you need to be able to test fast, iterate fast and kick out what does not work. For me, as a non-engineer, going for the agile approach does not start in the development teams and is not only applicable for devs but can be used in all teams.

Start small and make it big, without useless discussions. Sometimes just doing something gives you a faster result without exhausting your resources.

Quote found here: http://www.agilenutshell.com/