Agile thinking

The TimeZoneOne digital team are going all-in on Agile. It’s a field rich with jargon: sprints, scrum meetings, stand-ups, definition-of-done, burndown, velocity, user stories, retros… but we’re not going to talk about any of that.

At its heart, this popular set of methodologies focuses on making progress through small iterations rather than the traditional “big plan up-front.” Agile is designed to help you cope with change, reduce risk, and deliver value faster, in an environment where you don’t have all the answers.

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” — Donald Rumsfeld [1]

Over the past 18 months, we developers have been progressively testing and embedding Agile techniques. That’s right: we have used Agile to adopt Agile. But Agile approaches are not really about lines of code. Agile approaches are ways to manage complexity, change, unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Here then: a brief Agile guide to getting stuff done.

 Think small

Agile has at its heart the concept of “Minimum viable product.” What is the least you can do in order to deliver value to customers and learn something valuable to you? That’s your MVP. MVP might not be something you take to market (perhaps you test it out on your staff or stakeholders). But it could be. Let’s look at a famous example.

Zappos is the world’s largest online shoe store. It didn’t start out that way. Back in 1999, the founder, Nick Swinmurn, would wait around for online orders, then fulfil them by popping out to a physical store, buying them at full ticket price, and mailing them. Terrible business idea, right? That could never scale. Of course not: it was an MVP! This was Swinnurm’s experiment to test the viability of online shoe sales. He did the minimum required to validate his business idea. And it was a good one. In 2009, Zappos was purchased by Amazon for USD1.2 billion.[2]

MVP thinking is not about laziness. It’s not about doing as little work as possible. It’s about learning as quickly as possible, testing out ideas and failing fast.

MVP thinking is not about laziness. It’s not about doing as little work as possible. It’s about learning as quickly as possible, testing out ideas and failing fast.

Iterate

Once you have your MVP, what’s next? An Agile iteration is not simply a step on a long journey. It is that, but much more. An Agile iteration asks these questions:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where do we want to go?
3. What’s the next step?

We come back to those basic questions with every iteration. Perhaps the answer is to abandon a course of action, a plan, or a product that no longer makes business sense. Agile iterations challenge our commitment bias – our thinking that we need to proceed on a course we have already invested in. Agile iterations challenge us to do the right thing, to make the right business decision.

Evaluate

This is all very well, but how do we make these decisions? What does success look like? How do we know we’re winning — or not? Each iteration must include a measurement. What is the metric we want to move? Are we measuring it now? If not, we had better start.

Here’s an example. We notice that 30% of customers are dropping out of the sales funnel at a certain point. We develop a hypothesis, identify a usability problem here and make a plan to fix it. We make that change, then gather a new set of data. When that measurement is done, we evaluate the results. Positive? Great! Let’s lock them in. Negative? Perhaps our hypothesis is wrong. Time to try something else.

Agile partners

Where else in life do you set a course, lock it in and refuse to change it? This obstinate approach rarely makes sense. So why do we do it?

I think this is a result of an adversarial approach to business relationships – a zero-sum game where my win is your loss. Instead of fighting each other over the pie, let’s make a bigger pie.

We can execute the wrong decision because we are contractually obligated to deliver on an outmoded concept. Or we can understand and trust each other, act as partners, and we can make the right decisions at the right time.

Agile thinking: we can’t do it on our own.

By Matthew Walker, Development Manager, TimeZoneOne

[1] Rumsfeld spoke these words at a Department of Defense briefing in 2002 related to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. However, in his memoir, Rumsfeld passes on credit to NASA administrator, William Graham.

[2] Read more about the Zappos story in The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries. https://theleanstartup.com/book