1. Agile Software
Product Development
Eric Wu
Co-founder, Bracket Labs
@ewu
MBAX 6360 - 4 NOVEMBER 2014

2. 2
Who is this guy?
• Co-founder of software startup focused on
productivity software
• Project management
• Marketing management
• Sales activity management
• 18 years of product experience, 10 with
software
• Automotive, telecom, hard drives, software
• Engineering, product management,
executive

3. 3
Product Scorecard
• Worked on 11 new products
• 9 successful
• 1 killed before launch
• 1 big failure
• 6 of those products were
software (including the failure)

4. Agile Software Development

5. Why is this relevant?

6. Software is eating the world
-MARC ANDREESSEN, 2011
6

7. The lessons of Agile are
increasingly factoring into
business leadership

8. Software is different
• Writing the code = building the production
version
• Your engineers and designers are working
on factory floor / Your production workers
are responsible for creative process
• Constant learning and refinement as they
go
• Quality is directly related to developer ability
to creatively problem solve
• Complex bugs can be incredibly difficult to
fix

9. Waterfall

10. Waterfall problems
• Crystal ball business requirements
• Analysis and design when we know the least
• Big learning is when we code and test
• Incorporating big learning into is expensive
• Incorporating changed requirements is
expensive

11. How bad was it?
• Data published in 2002:
• Software projects needing
complete restart: 94%
• Average change in project
requirements: 25%
• Average cost overrun: 189%
• Launch delays are the norm
• Highly unpredictable = high
business risk

12. The death spiral
Missed Schedules
Forced Marches
Decreased Creativity
Decreased Quality
Missed Schedules

13. Something needs to change
• Starting in 90’s
experiments with
“lightweight” processes
• Scrum
• Extreme
Programming
• Early 2001 17
developers got together
and compared notes

14. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
14
The Agile Manifesto

15. What’s it mean?
• Self-organizing teams
• Trusted and accountable
• Regular, frequent conversations and
cooperation between business stakeholders
and the team building.
• Lean on those conversations instead of
documentation
• Working software produced regularly
• Iterate, iterate, iterate
• Value calm, regular, sustainable, predictable
pace of product development

16. Criticism
• De-centralized control
• Minimal documentation
• Too loose
• Requires significant behavioral changes
• Collaboration
• Visibility
• Adaptation to feedback and performance
• Breaks down with teams >~10

17. agile vs. Agile
• Eco-system of experts
• Trainers
• Consultants
• Products
• Formalized processes
• Rigid
• Dogmatic
• Lots of overhead
• Losing the forest

18. Sample Agile Process

19. 1. Sprints
1 week “sprints” that have regular heartbeat

20. 2. Sprint Breakdown
Each sprint begins/ends with same set of
meetings
• Demo - Everyone in company invited to see what
was built in previous week
• Retrospective - Team reviews previous week,
answers “what do we want to do more of? What
do we want to do less of?”
• Planning - Product owner brings prioritized list of
new things to build. Dev team estimates the size
of each feature, commits to delivering it in next
sprint until their plate is full.

21. 3. Stand-ups
Daily “standup” meetings
• What did you do
yesterday?
• What are you going to
do today?
• Do you have any
roadblocks?

22. Agile is evolving
10 YEARS AGO: “The shorter iteration the better,
you could get crazy and go as short as 2
weeks!”
TODAY: 1 week sprints common
TODAY: Increasing # of teams continuously
deploying
• Netflix, Etsy pushing 30+ updates a day
• Very possible with right infrastructure investment,
corporate values

23. Agile is evolving
10 YEARS AGO: “Fine for software but my
business / product is different”
TODAY: Agile philosophy applied to Sales &
Marketing, HR, Management

24. Eric Wu
eric@bracketlabs.com
@ewu
24