17a. Agile and Lean Distilled

Having introduced the topic of prototyping in Chapter 16, let’s now do a brief dive into the worlds of agile and lean.

Agile and lean involve unique methods and techniques when it comes to prototyping. It would be hard to say you’ve learned “Prototyping 101” without covering them, so we gotta do it.

Here comes agile and lean . . . distilled.

Agile

Agile principles were created to facilitate better product development in situations where traditional methods (waterfall) were not working so well.

Agile is especially popular in digital and software product development, where an ongoing iterative approach makes sense.

Agile is really more of a set of principles than it is a rigid set of procedures or methods. There are certainly popular “agile” methods — things like scrum and sprints, which we’ll discuss soon. But while those methods may evolve, the foundational principles of Agile do not.

Here are some more principles of agile, with some lean principles mixed in as well:

Source

Agile principles and methods might work for your product development situation, or they may not. It’s best to understand them so that you can apply them if and when it’s appropriate.

Lean

Lean is like agile in that it’s a set of principles. Lean principles are focused on efficiency, speed, and eliminating waste.

Lean principles can be applied to anything. You may have heard the term lean production or lean startup. Those terms just mean doing Production or starting a company in a consciously efficient and fast manner.

When applied to product development, lean principles are designed to achieve a faster and more efficient product development process.

If that sentence made your eyes glaze over, here’s an easier thought: lean means fast.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” — Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

Here’s another quote, this time about lean production.

“Lean production . . . is “lean” because it uses less of everything compared with mass production — half the human effort . . . half the investment in tools . . . half the engineering hours to develop a new product in half the time.” — The Machine That Changed the World

The lean approach includes methods and practices like ‘forming teams of experts,’ ‘concurrent processes,’ ‘cadence and pulls,’ and ‘visual management.’ I’m not going to dive into these here, but the common thread to lean is doing stuff that improves speed and efficiency and reduces waste.

Why Talk Lean and Agile Now?

Lean and agile bring some fresh ideas to the table when it comes to prototyping and the process of Build-Measure-Learn.

You’ll see how in the next few sections, where we’ll cover:

• The MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
• The sprint
• Scrum

Enjoy!

17b. The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Distilled

The MVP is one of the “hottest” concepts in all the product development — especially recently in the “lean startup” world of Silicon Valley.

Yes, that’s two Zoolander references within the topic of Prototyping.

Let’s distill this often used and abused concept.

MVP Defined

The term Minimum Viable Product was popularized by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. Here’s what he has to say:

“The MVP is that version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum amount of effort and the least amount of development time.” — The Lean Startup, Eric Ries

See that “build measure learn” reference there? An MVP is really a prototype in the broadest definition of the word. It’s a minimal version of the product, built to facilitate learning.

MVP = Minimum Viable Product = A prototype that facilitates testing and learning with minimal investment.

Source

What’s An MVP For?

Like I just said, an MVP is all about learning.

“A minimum viable product (MVP) helps entrepreneurs start the process of learning as quickly as possible. It is not necessarily the smallest product imaginable, though; it is simply the fastest way to get through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop with the minimum amount of effort.” Eric Ries

Steve Blank, the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, also uses the term “Minimum Feature Set” to describe essentially the same thing.

The point here is efficient learning. Don’t build more than you need to in order to start learning about your market and the customers.

“As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.” — Eric Ries

Here’s An Example

Source

If you suspect that customers need to get around town, and maybe you have a grand vision for something like a car, how would you build an MVP?

According to the lean startup approach, a skateboard is a good start. Then iterate and prototype a scooter. Then a bike . . . and so on and so forth.

Each iterative loop of build-measure-learn gives you more and more insight into the customer and his or her preferences. More learning allows you to build better solutions.

Contrast that with trying to achieve some final vision for the product by prototyping subsystems. That approach does not facilitate learning in the same way.

17c. MVPs Help You Learn About the Product and the Market and the Customer

I’ve been saying that prototyping is a mechanism for learning. That’s true.

The critical distinction that you need to know is that in agile and lean approaches, the prototype is the mechanism where much of the learning about the customer/consumer happens.

Contrast this with traditional approaches (Waterfall) where the learning is done more upfront, using market research and voice-of-customer methods.

Source

See the difference?

Building and testing a prototype is one of the most efficient and rapid ways to learn. So if you need to learn about consumer needs, use prototyping!

You can see why this approach is huge in the startup world. In a Startup, uncertainty is high. We’re talking about both product uncertainty and business uncertainty.

When there’s so much uncertainty, and often only so much time before the money runs out, rapid learning is paramount. You don’t spend months understanding customer needs — you build an MVP in a week and go!

This approach is sound . . . when it’s possible.

Again, there are few things in NPD that apply in every situation, and some products simply don’t lend themselves well to this method. Sometimes it is critically important to know the market and the consumer better from the outset and then use prototyping to validate well-researched hypotheses.

17d. The MVP: Not Just for Startups

The Minimum Viable Product is a limited version of a product concept that can help entrepreneurs (or product developers) begin the process of rapid, iterative learning.

“But I don’t work at a startup. Stop talking to me about MVPs.” — Some people

OK, fair enough . . . let’s address this. Are MVPs only relevant for people working at startups?

Startups and Products — Same Difference — It’s All About Learning

Yes, most people who talk about MVPs are typically talking about them in the context of startups. Some people — even Eric Ries himself — will draw a distinction between prototypes and MVPs.

“Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses.” Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

So is an MVP a prototype? Potato potato.

A simple way to distill it: an MVP is basically a prototype that also tests a business hypothesis, not just a product hypothesis.

What is ultimately important is that MVPs and prototypes are both methods that share a common goal: learning.

And since all NPD processes require product developers to learn (about customers, markets, technical features, etc.), it’s worthwhile to study MVPs in order to broaden your learning skill set.

Whether you are prototyping a company or whole product or a small product feature, you want to build something, test it, and learn how to improve it. That’s a universal skill needed in all product development processes.

“The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.” — Eric Ries

Some Final Tips For Building MVPs

• Measure something. If you do not measure something, how will you know if it worked?
• Fake it. Users can’t tell if a human is behind the curtain, making the MVP work. You don’t have to write code if you don’t have to.
• On the one hand, don’t care too much about what people will think of the MVP 
• On the other hand, don’t bum out your customers. Here’s a good article about making a Minimum “Lovable” Product, which offers some good contrasts to the typical MVP discussion.
• MVP’ing can happen all the time. It’s not a one-and-done process. It can be used over and over for new product features.

17e. The Design Sprint

The “sprint” is definitely something worth familiarizing yourself with if you plan to get into product management and/or product development.

While it sounds somewhat generic (i.e., let’s just go fast!), there’s actually a formula to a sprint. Let’s distill it.

What’s a Sprint?

Sprints are a method used in Agile product development to add a feature, update a product, or push toward some key milestone of learning.

Sprint — a fast-paced time-bound exercise designed to learn something about a product or business

“The “sprint” is a “five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.” — Google Ventures

(I cite Google because two people from Google actually formalized the currently accepted recipe for a sprint. That’s right, and the 5-day sprint was kind of born at Google.)

Anatomy of a Sprint

The structure of a sprint is very much like a micro-version of designing a product:

1. Understand
2. Diverge
3. Decide
4. Prototype
5. Validate / Test

Source

Looks kinda familiar, right? It’s kind of an accelerated NPD process. (See P.S. below.)

Now, this exact five-day sequence isn’t written in stone; different teams will adapt the general process and timing to their needs But one thing that doesn’t change is that a sprint is always brief — like a month or less. You can’t really call a two-month project a sprint,’ amirite?

Sprints have Objectives

Another key element of a sprint: clear objectives. sprints are used to solve something — they are objective-driven, not open-ended. Whether it be validating that a market exists or that a product feature should be fully developed, sprints are much like prototypes — they are a mechanism for rapid learning about something specific.

P.S. A 30 second rant on the similarities in all of the product development

You: “Wait…is a ‘sprint’ just an accelerated product development process squeezed into five days and repackaged as a new thing?

Me: “Uh . . . sort of?!”

The sprint may seem so new and cool, but it’s really very similar to the traditional method of product development.

• Understanding users and needs — that’s always something you have to do (voice of customer, jobs to be done, outcomes, design thinking, get out of the building).
• Diverge? That’s generating ideas and exploring the solution space (OST, Where good ideas come from).
• Decide. Of course, at some point, you need to converge on a few best concepts.
• Prototype. Yup — everyone does it.
• And validate or test — that’s inherent in the build-measure-learn cycle of prototyping.

So while the concept of sprinting is relatively new, it’s really based upon the traditional NPD approach.

17f. Scrum

Scrum is a very widely used method in agile development, so let’s distill this concept and understand the fundamentals.

The Scrum Process

Basically, the process is:

• Prioritize the product backlog (i.e. decide “what should we build next?”)
• Sprint planning (i.e., let’s bite off a small chunk of stuff and build just that)
• 2–4 weeks sprint (i.e., focused collaborative team effort to ship the new stuff)
• Retrospective (i.e., what went well, what didn’t?)

Obviously, this process is highly simplified, but you get the gist.

Source

Scrum Fundamentals

Scrum is a framework, or a general approach, for “developing, delivering, and sustaining” complex products.

Scrum uses sprints to chip away at a product feature backlog. A backlog is just a prioritized list of new features or updates you want to build for your product.

Other Fundamental Points:

• Part of agile
• Utilizes sprints.
• Has clear roles. Scrum Master. Scrum Team. Product Owner.
• Breaks a bigger project down into pieces
• Good for urgent, complex and novel projects
• Emphasis on communication and cross-functional work
• Repeating rhythm

Here is a really long quote from an article that captures a scrum quite well.

“Agile refers to a set of “methods and practices based on the values and principles expressed in the agile manifesto,” which includes things like collaboration, self-organization, and cross-functionality of teams.

A scrum is a framework that is used to implement agile development.

A good analogy would be the difference between a recipe and a diet. A vegetarian diet is a set of methods and practices based on principles and values. A recipe for chickpea tacos would be a framework you can use to implement your vegetarian diet.

This relationship is similar to the agile (the diet) and scrum (the recipe you follow).

Daily Scrum Meeting

When you read about scrum, you’ll always read about The Daily Standup. This meeting is daily and actually has a rigid 3-part agenda. That agenda is:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What do you intend to do today?
• Is anything blocking you from doing your work today?

I think it’s worth familiarizing yourself with The Daily Standup because this type of meeting can be useful in almost any product development method — not just a scrum.

“Scrum enables self-organizing groups by promoting strong communication between the team members, along with a few disciplines inside the project. The scrum model suggests that each and every sprint begins with a short planning meeting and ends with a review. These are the fundamentals of the scrum idea for project management.” — Source

Pro Tip: Bringing the Product Team together to coordinate work is generally a good thing regardless of whether you’re agile or waterfall or whatever.

In Summary

The goal of a scrum is iterative, and a rhythmic approach is to improve a product over time incrementally. It’s not a “one and done” “new product development” method.

Resources

Resources for MVPs

• The definitive resource on MVPs is The Lean Startup.
• Here is the author of The Lean Startup Eric Ries, giving a talk on MVP from 2009 (startuplessonslearned).
• https://boagworld.com/usability/prototyping/ — Dang, this is a great article on Prototyping!
• The Lean Startup Playbook has very specific instructions for creating and testing MVPs.
• Four Steps to the Epiphany — Steve Blank

Resources for Scrum

• https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#purpose — START HERE!! A really clear and simple overview
• THEEEE Scrum Guide — by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the Godfathers of Scrum.
• Trello blog on scrum

Resources for Sprints

• Brand Genetics website summarizing the book Sprint by Jake Knapp.
• A video book summary of that same book Sprint.
• Google Venture’s site on Sprints

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Knapp et al.