SUNDAY REWIND: Agile died while you were doing your standup

Despite the successes Agile has brought us, Nate Walkingshaw, CEO and Founder of Eighty, believes that it’s time to take our lessons from the approach and move on. In this Sunday rewind, we look back to when Nate explains why…

Nate says how Agile has done a great job in creating the need for customer collaboration and influencing the way we build software. But the way the information we gather from customers is communicated in Agile has stifled its ability to empower teams.

Read more articles in our Sunday Rewind series.

Today, most teams are strategically pointed at delivering outputs rather than achieving outcomes. “It’s time to change all that by aligning teams for direct connection to a shared mission/vision and the strategy it serves,” Nate says. At its core, the implementation of Agile is a very output-driven process. Teams are always working out how much they can get out of the door each quarter. This is the destructive thinking keeping us from leaving basecamp. Continuous discovery and delivery around an outcome is the road forward.

Reorganize your product, user experience, engineering, dev-ops teams into one force under one mission and one leader. Give it complete autonomy with accountability. “I still see a lot of egos out there in the C-suite over who owns the ‘how’ the ‘what’ and the ‘when.’” says Nate.  It’s time to let it go. Embrace the Experience Organization, and then build teams within it. The old matrix design is not in the best interest of the business or the customer.

You need small, cross-functional, co-located teams who have autonomy and accountability. These teams can discover and deliver a product solution to the customer as often as the team likes.

Read Agile died while you were doing your standup in full to discover insights on working with an autonomous and outcome-driven product team.