Tag: Learning

Throughout my agile journey I’ve experienced and facilitated many retrospective meetings for agile teams but also for long running projects. Often I’ve experienced that teams and sometimes even facilitators are not familiar with common basic structure of activities that an agile retrospective meeting should follow in order to make the meeting go smoothly and to generate qualitative action items for improvement. From my experience it helps teams a lot to when retrospectives are created along this structure of activities. The structure is published in the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, which I strongly recommend for anyone who is new to the subject.

In a previous post I covered the concept of minimum viable product (MVP) as a means of  supporting learning and validation of ideas during product development. To complete the picture I would now like to address the concept of minimal marketable product (MMP), which is a version of the product that is just sufficient to go to market with. On the one hand, MVP is used to validate whether you’re on the right path in creating a product that is valuable for users while reducing the risk of failure and waste; MMP is, on the other hand, aimed at achieving short time-to-market while delivering the right functionality to provide value to customers.

Many Agile projects still stick to working towards deadlines instead of iterating and building product increments. When working towards a deadline, building feature after feature per iteration, the benefits that one would normally have with an incremental way of working, such as learning about users, market, technology, and architecture are lost. The risk of waste is taken for granted in that case. Nevertheless the agile manifesto is violated on several points such as simplicity or delivering valuable software to users.

A major challenge faced in product development, especially with newly introduced products, is to validate whether or not the product solves problems and delivers value to it’s target group. It is common practice to develop products based on assumptions without involvement of real users. As a consequence the risks of failure and waste of costs is accepted. Even expensive market analysis cannot eliminate uncertainty about the product’s value to real users. Obtaining valid feedback and learn from a product that doesn’t exist yet can be difficult, which leads to a high degree of uncertainty in terms of features the product should contain. Why would you take that risks while real users are available to support you gathering insights and validate the product? The …

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