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The main reason why agile methods are popular is because managers think it means doing things faster. 1
Classic, industrial-age management likes things to go faster because that means things cost less. 2
Agile, of course, has nothing to do with going faster. It’s reason for existence is to do things better. 3
Doing things better is hard. How do you know you’re better? You have to know what your goal is to know that, and that’s hard. 4
It’s just damn easy to say I shaved a month off of the schedule, but damn hard to say I made the product better. 5
One is hard, numerical data, while the other is touchy-feely sensitive stuff that seems dangerously close to an opinion. 6
You can see strong echoes of this thinking in the almost religious obeisance paid to “data” in contemporary design decisions. 7
In the industrial age, saving money was a hugely important lever that governed a company’s very existence. 8
In the post-industrial age, saving money has little or no effect on a company’s fortunes, yet that’s the only management most know. 9
I’m not advocating sloth or wasting money, but going fast down the wrong road won’t get you to your destination. 10
You see the problem? We don’t actually have business accounting metrics that reflect the realities of how modern tech products are built. 11
And VCs use too little cash as a lever for controlling entrepreneurs. Or, alternatively, they use too much cash for the same purpose. 12
Agile’s basic idea is that you learn by doing, so do a little bit, then stop and integrate what you have learned. Then repeat. 13
Only a simpleton would fixate on the “little bit” and extrapolate that into “faster.” 14
The only way to make better quality digital products in a corporate environment is to establish quality goals. Qualitylines. 15
If you set a time boundary, everyone will work to satisfy the deadline. Deadlines ALWAYS supersede qualitylines. 16
IOW, your qualitylines will be a lie if you also have deadlines. 17
Now, I’ll be the first to agree that going as fast as possible is a very good thing, and that going slower than necessary is bad. 18
It’s just that the deadline, so useful in the factory-age, is profoundly counter-productive in the digital world. 19
IOW, management science is way behind on usefully defining how to create digital products. They can’t seem to let go of time & money. 20
Virtually every digital success story is about unconventional time, money, and work style, about breaking the time & money rules. 21
The only thing we actually KNOW about building digital products is that we DON’T KNOW HOW TO BUILD digital products. It’s time we learn. 22
