A Case Study of Our First Product Launch with Agile Methodology

I’m sure there’s a 1000 arguments to be made for/against agile. I also think agile has been spread so much that orgs following the same model could be doing it completely differently in practice.

One thing I don’t see often taken into consideration with agile is pace. Living in a world of never-ending sprints feels like aiming to run a marathon at 400m pace. The mindset of “go go go” favors doing over thinking. The reality is that things can take time to get done, and knowing what you are doing is better than mindlessly doing for the sake of getting a gold star at the end of a 2 week sprint only to spend a later 2 weeks correcting issues, todsing work, or changing course.

It can also be hard to innovate in such conditions. I’ve found that (reasonable) bouts of downtime can be productive in ways to refine/discover things not in the backlog. Sometimes when things are always fast paced there is no stamina left to experiment.

I'll be honest, my brain switches off every time I read an Agile article. There's so much obfuscatory terminology - methodology, sprint, scrum master - I always feel like it's all designed to confuse middle managers into buying Agile consulting and training services.

Of course, that's nothing to do with your platform. I like the website. How's business?