This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Lean Product Playbook" by Dan Olsen. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Is your product development process feeling slow and inflexible? Are you looking for ways to improve collaboration and customer-focused thinking?
Agile product development might be the solution you’re seeking. This approach breaks projects into smaller, manageable cycles, allowing for greater adaptability and faster delivery. You can use popular methods such as Scrum and Kanban—or hybrid approaches that combine the best of different approaches.
Keep reading to discover how Agile can transform your product development process and help you achieve greater success.
Agile Product Development
After you’ve tested your product and validated its product-market fit, the next step is to build and launch your product. Dan Olsen suggests you use an “Agile” product development methodology. With an Agile approach, you’ll break projects into small cycles of work—as opposed to following a traditional “waterfall” or sequential approach of crafting a detailed plan at the beginning of a project and working continuously and consistently until every step of the plan is completed in its predetermined order.
Segmenting a project into smaller pieces increases flexibility, collaboration, and customer-centric thinking, allowing you and your team to respond quickly and adapt to changes. It also reduces the margin for errors seen in larger projects and allows you to put deliverables in front of customers sooner.
According to Olsen, the two most popular Agile methodologies are Scrum and Kanban. Scrum divides work into small manageable parts called “sprints,” typically lasting one to four weeks. Kanban involves visualizing tasks by putting cards featuring user stories on a board, allowing teams to see the workflow and manage it effectively. Olsen suggests experimenting with one for a few months to figure out which works best for your purpose.
| The Best of Both Worlds: Use Hybrid Approaches Instead of choosing between Agile and traditional “waterfall” methodologies, some experts recommend you take a hybrid approach to compensate for the weaknesses of each methodology. While Agile methods promote flexibility, speedy delivery, and customer-oriented thinking, they can fall short in providing proper documentation and predicting precise timelines and costs. Conversely, while the waterfall model provides predictability, detailed documentation, and a structured approach, its rigidity can lead to late discovery of issues and difficulty adapting to evolving needs. By blending the two, as some companies have done, you can strike a balance between structure and adaptability and achieve greater project success. Similarly, you can also consider an approach that combines Scrum and Kanban—a hybrid methodology aptly named Scrumban. It brings together the structured nature of Scrum and the visual, tracking capabilities of Kanban for improved project management. Scrumban provides increased flexibility, continuous delivery, and faster issue resolution. Experts recommend using this hybrid methodology for software development projects with evolving requirements, teams working on simultaneous projects, and for startups. |
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Lean Product Playbook summary:
- An entrepreneur’s guide to making the best product on the market
- How to create a new product without gambling on the results
- How and where to find your target market and audience
