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.