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1-Page Summary of The Age of Agile
Introduction
Organizations are different from how they used to be. They’re more connected and personalized than ever before, which is why they’re so successful. People can now make international calls with Skype or Zoom at affordable prices instead of paying through the nose for them. You can listen to music on Spotify and Pandora without having to go through commercial radio stations or pay exorbitant amounts for CDs in stores. Banks have also gotten better by offering their customers faster access to products that have been around for a long time, like loans and credit cards.
In today’s business world, consumers expect more from the products and services they purchase. Companies that provide this value to their customers thrive in a volatile environment while companies who fail to keep up disappear one by one.
How can your organization thrive? The answer is not simple, but if you follow the laws of Agile management, you will be better positioned to survive. These laws are: 1) The Law of the Small Team 2) The Law of the Customer 3) The Law of the Network 4) There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for these principles; every organization should figure out what works best for them.
The Law of the Small Team
The difference between winners and losers in today’s world is not whether they have access to technology or big data. Both successful and unsuccessful firms have access to the same technology, which is a commodity that everyone needs nowadays. In fact, Kodak failed because it didn’t fully embrace new technology.
The real difference between winners and losers in today’s world is whether companies allow their employees to be innovative. In order to do this, they need autonomy, connectivity, resources, and motivation. This was the conclusion of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 that inspired firms to prioritize value creation for customers over processes and tools. Three main principles from the manifesto are: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Functionality over documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Many companies still take a top-down approach to innovation, where an employee with a great idea has to write up a proposal and get it approved. This takes time and is often too slow for the fast pace of today’s world.
It is better to divide big problems into small batches and address them by cross-functional, autonomous teams. These teams should be free to work in short cycles and get fast feedback from end users so they can iterate many times until their goal is achieved. Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” feature was developed within four months because the company embraced this method of problem solving. Matt Ogle, a senior product leader at Spotify who came up with the idea, didn’t have to prepare a detailed proposal or negotiate his way up the management chain before he could test it on staff members at Spotify. After positive reception from those staff members, Ogle’s team continued tweaking their algorithms for another six months while offering the feature to all 75 million of Spotify’s users as well as other listeners around the world. The feature was very successful and had been streamed several billion times within its first six months after launch.
You don’t have to work for a startup to embrace the Law of the Small Team. For example, Barclays is a global bank that offers products and services in personal, corporate, and investment banking sectors. It operates in over 40 countries and handles more than one-third of payments made in the UK. Despite its size, Barclays has learned to embrace the Law of the Small Team because it was threatened by technology companies who were better positioned to create instant responses for customers. As a result, Barclays announced that they would make their organization Agile as part of an initiative to improve market share.
