Agile Product Development: How to Design Innovative Products That Create Customer Value

Discover what it takes to develop products that blow your users away—and take market share from your competitors. This book will explain how the principles behind agile product development help designers, developers, architects, and product managers create awesome products; and how to look beyond a shiny user interface to build a great product. Most importantly, this book will give you a shared framework for your product development team to collaborate effectively.

Product development involves several key activities—including ideation, discovery, design, development, and delivery—and yet too many companies and innovators focus on just a few of them much to the detriment of the product’s success in the marketplace. As a result we still continue to see high failure rates in new product development, be it inside organizations or startups. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, these failures are largely avoidable.

In the last fifteen years, advances in agile software development, lean product development, human-centered design, design thinking, lean startups and product delivery have helped improve individual aspects of product development. However, not enough guidance has been available to integrate them in the context of the product development life cycle.

Until now. Product developer extraordinaire Tathagat Varma in Agile Product Development integrates individual knowledge areas into a field manual for product developers. Organized in the way an idea germinates, sprouts, and grows, the book synthesizes the body of knowledge in a pragmatic way that is more natural to the entire product creation process rather than from individual practices that constitute it.

In today’s hyper-innovative world, being first to the market, or delivering feature-loaded products, or even offering the latest technology doesn’t guarantee success anymore. Sure, those elements are all needed in the right measures, but they are not sufficient by themselves. And getting it right couldn’t be more important: Building products that deliver awesome user experiences is the top challenge facing businesses today, especially in a post-Apple world where user experience and design has been elevated to a cult status.