Agile & Lean

During the development of MarketMate RS we've followed a few core principles and I thought it might be interesting to talk about a couple of them here:

1. Lean Startup - insightful talk by Eric Ries here,   and his blog 'Start Up Lessons Learned' here,
Wikipedia Definition:
"Lean Startup is sometimes described as Lean Thinking applied to the entrepreneurial process^[3]. A central tenet of Lean Thinking is to reduce waste. Lean Startup processes use Customer Development to reduce waste by increasing the frequency of contact with real customers, therefore testing and avoiding incorrect market assumptions as early as possible.^[4] This approach attempts to improve on historical entrepreneurial tactics by reducing the work required to assess assumptions about the market, and to decrease the time it takes a business to find market traction."
Note: As Eric Ries points out, the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

2. Agile Development - Wikipedia Definition: "Agile methods generally promote a disciplined project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals."


Thoughts:
Both of these concepts resonate with me in that both occasions when I've started a business ( when starting Dunedin Global Recruitment 4 years ago and now launching MarketMate RS) it has been from the ground up, self-financed without the backing of venture capital.

Both of their core principals revolve around working as closely as possible with customers/users instead of taking a top-down design approach, shipping a product which you 'expect' to be perfect for the customer without actually asking the customer what they want.

The 'Lean Start-Up' is of particular interest. Eric Ries discusses his simple principle of 'Stop wasting people's time' in his talk at the Web Expo 2.0 . When developing MarketMate we have adopted some of these ideas as the core of the design and production process. It basically involves having frequent iterations and releases of new product functionality and design which is then reviewed by the customer and fed back into the design process to evolve the next iteration. This process, when done well, leads to only developing functions which add value to the customer. Done well, it results in greatly increased customer satisfaction and efficiency savings (self financing any project will always give you a drive to cut inefficiency).

The 'Agile Development' principle is based on the understanding that small teams work more effectively than large teams and that the customer should be a key part of the team. I think this is where 'Lean Startup' and 'Agile Development' synchronise. They are both simple concepts but have deep roots in guiding the development of an organisation. For instance, Microsoft, as one of the largest companies in the world, will rarely have teams of more than 4 to 8 people, even on their largest projects. The key here is that they divide the overall project up into small areas of functionality and allow the small teams to take ownership of their area. 

As development continues with MarketMate RS, we will find out whether these concepts really bear fruit. So far, they have proven to be robust and my expectation is that they will serve us well in the coming years.

In the beginning....

We've successfully navigated the last 9 months of development and I thought it would be good to do a 'Story so far' piece:

Background

I started my own internationally focussed recruitment agency in 2006 after working for a medium sized Scottish agency and before that, a large London based agency. We achieved significant growth in the first few years in what was largely a candidate driven market until the global crash in financial markets in 2008/9 which forced us to rethink many standard working practices and drive for greater efficiencies in the business.    

From Concept to Action - September 2009:

While searching clients websites for jobs to match a new candidate's profile, a thought crossed my mind:

"Why can't we search all of our clients live jobs from one place? It's just data floating around on the internet so if it's out there it must be possible to aggregate it and save a load of time, boost productivity and increase my revenue."

We spent a few days searching the internet for a solution we realised that the software providers to the recruitment industry are generally IT guys rather than Recruitment Consultants and focussed on RPO or candidate database systems. The market has changed but the providers haven't. After another cup of coffee I decided to make it happen and throw some investment behind it to get it off the drawing board.

From Design to Starting Commercial Trials - February 2010:

Over the winter we hired a team of developers, laid out the designs, found out what was achievable and challenged them to go further. The project grew and was finally christened MarketMate. It fulfilled the role of a traditional 'resourcer' and keeps track of the jobs market... as well as much more.

As we progressed through the development cycle we discovered that the data we were collecting was capable of delivering far more than the sum of its parts. New functionality could be added and new market-wide insights could be gained from analysing the amazing data that was being produced. Let's just say that the MarketMate project grew in potential and we knew that we should go to market with it rather than sit on it in-house. 

The first step towards commercially launching was to approach a well regarded agency with the opportunity to trial the software and we were over the moon when we secured our trial partner. The trials were set to begin in February so we worked hard to pull the user interface up to standard, aiming for as high a quality as possible before sending it out into the wild. We'd now crossed the first major hurdle of industry acceptance and hoped to gain valuable insights and feedback from the trial process.


Further Development before commercial launch - Feb - July 2010 (the present)

Last week (May 10th) we had an update meeting with the trial partner and had an excellent session. Many of our ideas are now being integrated into the newest version of MarketMate RS and the user interface is really taking shape. The additional functionality looks great and, with the help of the feedback, we have re-focussed on developing the core further.

We are ambitiously looking at going to market during July 2010 (if all runs smoothly) just in time for the soccer world cup finals... lets hope it's not too hard to get meetings arranged!

A big thanks to the team for their work so far and watch this space for more updates to come!