Over the past decade, innovative companies, software industry thought leaders and lean/agile pioneers have discovered simpler, sturdier, more streamlined ways to be agile. These modern approaches share a focus on producing exceptional outcomes and growing an outstanding culture. Today, it makes far more sense to bypass antiquated agility in favor of modern approaches. Modern agile methods are defined by four guiding principles: Make People Awesome; Make Safety a Prerequisite; Experiment and Learn Rapidly and Deliver Value Continuously. World famous organizations like Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Etsy and others are living proof of the power of these four principles. However, you don’t need to be a name brand company to leverage modern agile wisdom.
http://www.modernagile.org
Interview with Colleen Johnson, Founder and CEO, ScatterSpoke
Episode 23 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Colleen Johnson, Founder and CEO of ScatterSpoke, a tool for more effective team retrospectives. Colleen recounts how difficult it can be to put the agile practices to work when you’re building your own product. She mentions the ease of falling into “MVP bloat”, adding too many features to your early product and not delivering early enough. Colleen describes how ScatterSpoke supports the practice of Continuous Retrospectives by letting people continuously submit (via tools like Slack) messages that get saved in ScatterSpoke. Colleen mentions her work with responsive roadmapping, a pull-based and capacity-oriented approach to roadmapping that constantly considers changing customer needs instead of nailing down a concrete plan that isn’t supposed to change.