Agile Bites

Next up in our MVP series, we're talking about schedule and cost—two related elements that can trigger essential pivots in your project.

In this episode, host Phil Ledgerwood shares practical insights on estimating timelines, development costs, and additional considerations such as infrastructure and promotional expenses. Learn how these factors play a pivotal role in making informed decisions about your MVP. 

How do you decide which features should make it into your MVP?

When people first think about MVPs, usually this is the point they jump to (side note: if you haven't listened to our previous episodes in our MVP series yet, go back and listen to those first!)

With countless feature options and probably many strong opinions, it can be challenging to narrow down what features you should invest in for your first MVP. 

In this episode, Host Phil Ledgerwood shares the framework and exercises he uses to help define MVP features with that will be valuable for future decisions about your product.

Forget about software for a second and think about what your user actually wants to accomplish. Why would they want your software in the first place? What are you helping them to get done more easily than they could without your software?

Those questions are what you should be thinking about when it comes to user journey—not screens or features. Because your users don't inherently care about those things. They just want to accomplish whatever they need to get done in a way that makes sense to them.

In this episode, Host Phil Ledgerwood explains the importance of user journeys and what you need to think about as you go about understanding how your users will best interact with your product.

Next up in our series about MVPs, we're talking about personas. To know if people are going to use your product, you first have to understand the people you would be building the product for—because no product can be built for “everyone.” 

In this episode, Host Phil Ledgerwood breaks down MVP personas into three parts: identifying potential users, understanding them, and empathizing with them. When you truly understand your potential users, that knowledge helps you build a product that serves your users better—and that should be your ultimate goal.

In the next episode in our series about MVPs, we're talking about the vision: the thing that guides, outlines the scope, and captures the value of the MVP. 
 

Everything we do in the MVP needs to be geared towards the vision—not towards your idea of the final product. If it’s extraneous to the vision, it’s extraneous to the MVP. Sticking to the vision will keep you from wasting time and money on features that aren't necessary to validate the core of your product.

After 67 episodes, it's about time we talk about the MVP—Minimum Viable Product.

There are a whole lot of conversations online about what an MVP is and what it isn't. We're not setting out to define it once and for all. Instead, we're taking you through the same process we go through with our clients in this special series about MVPs.

And this first episode is all about the “what” and the “why” behind this framework that can help you validate a product idea before putting a full investment into it.

We're covering the last assumption of Little's Law in this series, and this time we're looking at why consistent units must be used for all measures

This one seems obvious and trivial, but that doesn't always translate on a practical level when we're thinking about how we want our work items and the planning around them to look.

This assumption comes down to deciding what unit of measurement is valuable for planning and communicating, and then only using those units—not transferring them to other ways of measuring.

In this episode, dive into this thought-provoking assumption with us and learn how consistency of your measurements can make your forecasts more meaningful, stable, and reliable. 

It's time to unpack another assumption of Little's Law, and this time we're looking at how and why the average age of WIP must not be meaningfully changing.

This is probably one of the most misunderstood assumptions because people think everything must be the same size. But the key to remember here is the word "average." Little’s Law needs the average age to stay level— not each individual age to stay level.

In this episode, Host Phil Ledgerwood talks through this assumption and its upsides/downsides.

We've been working our way through a series on the assumptions of Little's Law, and this episode is about the importance of keeping your WIP constant in your system as a whole.

Little’s Law doesn’t tell you the right amount of WIP—it just wants it to be stable so that you're pulling work at the same rate that work is completed. This way, your system stays flowing and is neither underworked nor overworked.

In this episode, Host Phil Ledgerwood illustrates how this assumption of Little's Law works, and how you can implement it in your team.

When a card gets pulled to work on, that should mean that the team is committing to not only starting it but also (and more importantly) finishing it.

Now, we all know that it's not always that simple. Blockers happen, new priorities come down the management pipeline, and, unfortunately, cards in progress are forgotten or pushed backward into the backlog.

But at the end of the day, your team is judged on the work they finish—not the work they start. And that's why the commitment to finishing should be the highest priority rather than the commitment to start something.

In this episode, Host Phil Ledgerwood talks about why cards get started but not finished and how to avoid ending up in this situation in the first place.