80% of a product’s value comes from 20% of its functions. The magic of agile lies in helping you figure out how to create those 20% of the functions first. In the traditional product development process, the development team doesn’t know until the final delivery of the product. What is the 20% of the functions that customers really need, which means that 80% of their efforts are wasted.
1. Find the most valuable 20%
The 20-80 law is familiar to everyone, and it is the same when developing a product: 80% of the value of a product comes from 20% of its functions.
In anything you buy, most of the value, which means most of the features that people want, is only 20% of all the features.
The magic of agile is that it can help you find out how to start creating the 20% of the functions first. In the traditional product development process, the development team does not know what the 20% of the functions that customers really need are until the final delivery of the product. That means 80% of their effort goes to waste.
Agile requires the team to regularly and quickly launch some feasible new results , in order for the team to see how much value the new results can generate , see how people react, and get feedback . Based on this feedback, he can then adjust the team's actions in the next sprint, thereby establishing an iterative feedback loop, which helps to accelerate the speed of innovation and adjustment, so as to evaluate how much value the team's activities create. .
What is given to the user for the first time, that is, the "minimum viable product", it needs to have a certain use value. While it might seem awkward for a developer to give a user a "minimum viable product", you should get a basic working product out to the public as soon as possible to get feedback to improve your decisions and adjust your backlog order of priority .
Then you continue to develop the features that customers value, and release them when all the features of the entire product are 20% complete. You know it's not perfect, but it's close to perfect, and if you try to make the product perfect before releasing it, you're wasting opportunities to find other value.
Value Curve: Deliver Faster
2. Use the Fibonacci sequence to estimate
Once the things to do are listed and prioritized, the next step is to determine how much energy, time, and money the project will cost.
In general, agile teams like to use the Fibonacci sequence to define the difficulty of backlog items.
1, 3, 5, 8, 13. These numbers show a certain regularity: 8 is the sum of the previous two numbers, and 13 is also the sum of the previous two numbers. This kind of sequence is called "Fibonacci sequence", also known as "golden section sequence" . Everyone has an intuitive feeling about this.
The Fibonacci sequence is all around us
In the Fibonacci sequence, the differences between different numbers are large enough that we can easily tell the difference between one number and another. If one person rates one item as a 5 and another as an 8, we instinctively perceive the difference. But what about the difference between 5 and 6? It's quite subtle, and our brains can't actually tell the difference.
Specific to planning poker in agile, it is also very simple to say, everyone has a deck of cards with interesting Fibonacci numbers printed on it, that is, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on. Every item that needs to be evaluated is listed and brought to the table. Then, according to the difficulty of the matter, people draw a corresponding poker card and put it on the table, but face down, and then listen to the password and turn over the cards together.
If there are no more than 2 cards with a difference between the numbers (such as one 5, two 8s, and one 13), just add up the numbers of these cards and take an average (in this case , the average is 8.5), and then move on to the next item.
3. A transparent team with no little secrets
When you talk about yourself, you often feel that you are right; when you talk about others, you are often used to making judgments. This is one of the most devastating mistakes humans are prone to make. There is even a special name for this tendency, called "fundamental attribution error".
But when a team works together and unites as one, it will burst into magic, such as the Argentina team that just won the World Cup.
Otamendi, who made an impulsive mistake 4 years ago, was extremely calm in this World Cup; Romero, who had made a mistake in the penalty area, knelt down and passed the ball, without giving the French any chance; the moment Messi scored in Mbappe, Almost kneeling on the ground, a second before landing, he immediately stood up, turned around and confirmed his expression. They gave up their flashy and completed their own revolution. They seem to be high-spirited and seem to rise into the sky. When they form a whole, they are even stronger. It is precisely because of teamwork and mutual complement that they are finally Hold the Hercules Cup high.
In an agile team, transparency is particularly important , which means that there should be no secret cliques, secret agendas, or other secrets within the team. In many cases, in traditional projects, the problem of employees is that they do not get enough information, and the problem of bosses is that they do not provide enough information to their subordinates.
Leadership on an agile team means knowledge, and it means that the leader is serving others like a servant, whose job it is to call meetings, ensure transparency about how the team is functioning, and, most importantly, help the team spot obstacles.
The point of the daily standup is to bring everyone together in a room and have them quickly discuss how to work together as a team. They are no longer individuals with a set of skills, but a team trying to move an entire house of “to do” notes under the “done” column.
4. Agile will greatly reduce the risk of failure
Risk management is at the heart of any successful business.
Agile can reduce the risk of failure for you, the three most common types of risk are market risk, technology risk and financial risk.
In other words: What do people need from us? Can we make it? Can the products we make be sold?
The Scrum method focuses on incremental iterations, which can help you minimize market risk and help you show products to customers faster. Since you can collect user feedback early and often, you can make small changes to the product in real time, without having to wait until you've invested millions of dollars and realize the product doesn't fit the customer Only after the demand was forced to make drastic adjustments.
Customers may initially tell you what they want, but in reality, they don't know what they really need until they have used your product.
The technical risk is worthy of attention, and whether it can make what customers want is a thorny issue. For almost all of Apple's products, several prototypes with basic functions and fully usable products are often made first, and then compared to select the best one.
This approach reduces financial risk by allowing your team to implement different ideas simultaneously and quickly without having to make large-scale investments. The most you lose is the time and effort you put into the first few sprints, not the millions of dollars you've lost building a huge, complex, unprofitable product.
5. Only by embracing change can we embrace value
The contractors of many government projects bid at a lower price first, and then realize profits by charging the government for changing requirements. This has become a business model. When a contractor signs on to a large project that will take years, all the requirements will be listed in a beautiful Gantt chart, it is difficult for the contracting unit not to say, "Well, this will do it." Next, the contractor will say : "We promised to do this and that. If you change your requirements, we will charge you extra." This method of adding money after the fact is the main reason for overruns, so that major companies and institutions have to set up special settings for this purpose. "Requirements Change Control Board".
This makes sense from a cost standpoint, by limiting the number of times you change a requirement, you can control the resulting cost.
But these developers don't realize that controlling changes in requirements is tantamount to denying the real needs of customers . As they strive to limit costs, they also limit learning, innovation, and creativity.
If, shortly after you start a project, you discover that the truly valuable features (that is, the 20% of features that deliver 80% of the value) are not among the features you listed, then traditional project management methods will not only Preventing you from changing inherent needs also prevents you from creating value at a faster rate.
In modern projects, it is often necessary to change requirements. If there is no change, the project will not have any value.