#agile #agilemethods #innovation #entrepreneurship
No matter what your background, if you work as an entrepreneur, you're going to have to work in an agile environment. Now, you might have heard about agile methods before. But I want to talk to you about what I think about when I think about an agile working method. So let's go back to when I was opening my first business, I had this brilliant idea to take sheet music that musicians would use and digitize it and create a sort of custom piece of hardware that would allow them to flip between the pages. And this was before tablets were even around. And so when I thought about the product that I was going to create, I thought about it in linear terms, I thought about it as a starting point and an ending point, I begin the process of creating it, manufacturing it, distributing it, and the end point was getting it into the hands of the customers. But this is a very old fashioned way of thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship, innovation. And entrepreneurship should never be a linear process, we have to think of it in a way that's non linear. And all that means is that we have to approach the design and development process as a cycle. And it's a cycle that repeats itself over and over and over again. Now there are an infinite number of ways that you can use an agile methodology when you're designing and developing a new product or service. But one of my favorite approaches is to think of it in three parts, build, measure, learn. And like I said, it's a cycle. So you're going to build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn, until you have something that's ready to roll out to the market. So let's start with the build process. Building just means creating. So what are you going to develop? What ideas are you going to create? What products or services are you going to come up with, it's about putting something into some kind of tangible form, even if it's just a short presentation, even if it's a prototype, even if it's the simplest version of your idea, but getting something ready getting something prepared, so you can move into the next stage, which is measure. So now you're going to take what you've done, you're going to take whatever it is you've created in that tangible form, and you're going to evaluate it to understand how it's working, whether or not it's doing what it's intended. And whether or not your idea actually has value. Now, when you're measuring a great way of doing this is to approach the communities and stakeholders that might have an interest in what you've created. And this gives you a chance to validate what you've done. And make sure that the stakeholders and the users or the customers actually want what it is that you've created. A good way of failing as an entrepreneur is to create something within your own narrow framework of understanding and never talk to another person about it. I'll give you an example. One of my colleagues had a PhD student, and the PhD student came to the supervisor and he said, I have a great idea. For my PhD, what I'm going to do is innovate a new operating system that is customized for people who are blind or partially sighted. Now my supervisor took one look at him and said, Are you sure this is what you want to do? He insisted This is the best idea he's ever had. And it's going to be a great and revolutionary thing. And so the supervisor came back to him and said, Hey, why don't you talk to some people who are blind or partially sighted and just see what they want. So of course, he approached the disabled people's organization. And he asked them, What do you think of my idea, and they immediately dismissed it, because they didn't want a customized operating system just for them. They wanted a operating system that works for everyone. They want to use the same operating systems that everyone else uses, but they wanted to work for them. So he quickly had to completely reformat his idea and go a diffe
