The Many Flavors of Agile: What’s the right one for your team?

2018 has been my year for stepping out of my comfort zone and working to more consistently share my knowledge as a product manager to the greater tech industry. To that end, I had the great fortune to attend Lesbians Who Tech in San Francisco and talk a little about agile development.

The talk was limited to about 10 minutes but it really aimed at dispelling a few notions. The first is simply the fact that Waterfall is always the worst option. The second is that development teams can only use a select few types of agile methodologies. The last is that a team should pick one type of development style and never leave it.

In my career, I have now worked at 5 different product shops that used very different development styles and were all fairly successful in their process. Most importantly, their bottom line was safe no matter how many times a process might be changed.

To this end, I actually believe that choosing a development process is really a simple equation. The equation includes: How mature is the development team? How much skill does the development team have? What type of business am I in (e.g. SAAS, insurance, etc.)? When am I expected to provide a delivered feature? Based on this, it becomes much easier to determine which development process might be the most successful for your team.

I’ve had such great feedback on the talk that I wanted to put it out in the world for attendees. I am also planning to revamp the content for another talk later this year, so stay tuned for more insights!

Link for video and presentation is here!