Agile Product Development Tips For Beginners

The principles of agile product development help all sorts of organizations to build products responsively. When agile is included in the process of development, the risk of failure decreases, and the product adapts well to changes and uncertainties in the market. Initially, this methodology was popularised as an approach to software development but now this methodology has crossed over into multiple other teams from marketing to HR. Whole organizations now define themselves as ‘agile’ because it is the need of the hour.

The concept of agile, its manifesto was published nearly two decades ago now, has superseded the previously popular waterfall approach to software and product development. There were seventeen leading software developers of the industry involved in writing the manifesto. Breaking it to the simplest of terms- agile is not about following a preordained plan, it’s more about making changes based on the newest information that you have. Agile focuses on customer involvement, iteration, and constant learning.

Source: ProductPlan

Benefits of Agile Product Development

In today’s world, agile stands as one of the most popular project management approaches mainly because it is evolutionary and flexible. The benefits of agile make it easier for product developers to do their respective jobs. With the help of this methodology, their control over the projects improves. This method is so successful because it focuses on delivering the best possible outcome within the project constraints.

Here are some of the benefits of agile product development:

Respond rapidly to change

The needs of customers are ever-evolving which requires companies to have a very flexible product definition to stay relevant in the market. With agile prioritisation, you can decide the order in which the tasks of your project will be completed. A number of product development templates can help you organize those priorities, as it is essential for a team to work in a specific order to bring out the best work.

Teams can produce their best work

If you want your company and its products to stay competitive, you’ll have to respond rapidly to changes in the market, which is where an agile approach comes in. And one of the key factors in the success of agile are scrum teams. To get the best out of any team, you have to work in a specific direction that starts right from the time you start building the team. The people you hire should be highly skilled, and your leadership team should be apt for things to function decently.

As far as hiring is concerned, there are tools available in the market that can help you track the journey of a client from a visitor to hired employee. The agile product applicant tracking software (ATS) of Bookafy can help you track the initial website visitors and help your HR team build a relationship with them for hiring purposes.

Bookafy is a marketing leader and offers a robust set of features and powerful integration. You can easily embed it into your headless CMS / apps / email with an iframe, button, or link to a booking page. Some of the apps that it can be integrated with are shown in the image below.

Moreover, when it comes to empowering teams, agile can turn out to be a gamechanger. With agile prioritisation, you can decide the order in which the tasks of your project will be completed. It is essential for a team to work in a specific order to bring out the best work.

Great Customer Satisfaction

In agile product development, customers or end users are always involved in the decision-making process. Their involvement leads to a better customer retention rate. In traditional methods, customers are typically not involved after the planning phase, i.e., the execution part, which affects adaptability and flexibility. However, in agile, because customers are involved in almost every phase, the final products are tailored to their needs. This ensures that the product delivers all the values that customers require and expect from it.

Quicker launch with lower cost

An agile approach allows for the development of the product to happen simultaneously with the information collection process. This benefit of agile development is essential for companies who want to launch their product in a short period of time. When the product is launched in a shorter time span, its relevance is unlikely to have become compromised. Moreover, the less time it takes to develop a product, the lower costs usually are.

3 Tips For Beginners

Implementing agile does not have a high barrier to entry, even for beginners. Now let’s jump into some practical tips that can be helpful for everyone, be it a beginner or an advanced professional.

Small Cross-functional Teams

Agile product development teams should be small and nimble with usually no more than 7 members including the product owner, scrum master and development team, including UX and UI, or equivalent roles if a physical product is being developed. The compact nature of agile teams helps improve collaboration and efficiency.

Large product development projects that necessitate larger numbers of specialists working on them should be split up into smaller teams working in parallel to each other and to a ‘scaled agile’ framework.

Source: CleverTap

Minimal Viable Product

There is often the misconception a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a cheap and quick way to research if a product will work or not when launched to market as a ‘complete’ product. However, in agile product development, the MVP is a commercially viable product that adds value for users compared to available alternatives, or the lack of any alternative.

An MVP should represent enough of the core features of your product for it to represent value added. After all, the main value that your product provides should always come through its core features rather than some additional functionality. MVP focuses on solving the major pain points. Subsequent iterations should improve on the UI/UX, based on user behavior and feedback, and ‘nice-to-have’ secondary features.

Constant Focus on Business Value

One of the central benefits of agile product development is that it promises to deliver a solution that truly meets the requirements of an organisation. Even the agile manifesto states that: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” To ensure that your product delivers the value that your business expects it to, the product owners have to have a clear picture of the product, and it should be communicated accurately to the team members involved. This keeps the project on the right track, and from here, you can work on customer feedback to further improve your product.

Final Words

You might face some challenges in the initial stages of introducing an agile approach to product development but it will be worth pushing through. Adopting an agile methodology will give you an edge. If implemented correctly, agile product development can make a significant contribution to the success of product-based companies.