Agile for Everybody

Introduction

My Introduction to Agile: “Twice the Work in Half the Time”

We are going to be implementing some new Agile processes that will allow our product teams to get twice as much work done in half the time.

This was the first thing I heard about Agile, and I had no reason to doubt it. I was working as a product manager at a medium-sized company, and our executive team had called a company-wide meeting to share its plans for the coming year. I was not sure whether “Agile” was a thing with a capital A or just a general descriptor of the way we would be working moving forward, but in either case, it sounded pretty good to me. My team had been fairly slow to get new products out the door, in large part because changes in leadership had left us without a clear vision against which to execute. Maybe this “Agile” thing would help us solve for that? Upon returning to my desk, I quickly did a search for “Agile process,” and was greeted with the following paragraph via Wikipedia:

Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen interactions throughout the development cycle. The Agile Manifesto ...