Why Agile is the only way for building ventures
By: Anton De Meester
Tags: Learnings

Do you want to deliver high quality products ⚡fast⚡? There is not other way for building ventures fast, reliable and quality-complete than with Agile.

With Agile, I don’t mean user stories, scrum, or standing up during meetings. I am talking about the core values of Agile and how they fit into your team. All other things are just tools and methods. If you can work Agile while everybody is sitting at a desk talking about requirements, then go for it.

Agile is building ventures in iterations

A lot of other people have written about how to use Agile in general. Fast, short sprints. Write requirements as you go. Create a backlog instead of a fixed scope. Go to the scrum alliance, or the agile manifesto or any of the other 20.000 articles written on the core values of Agile. I’ll go over the values that we use at 0smosis. I’ll explain how we make sure we are able to deliver fast, focused and full-quality.

I’ll start with some context about Agile on the 0smosis way.

One week sprints

No standups

3 teams (Helder, 0per and Diavest)

3–4 people per team

These are not super common but don’t set us apart. It is the way in which a small company with different teams works. But the following values are common across all our teams. It’s ingrained in the way we go for building ventures.

Learn by experience

Prioritisation

One team mentality

Learn by experience 🤓

I wish I could say we did everything right the first time. But we didn’t. We make a lot of mistakes. We start with building a new venture, let’s say a new app. Then we realise we need to check if there could be a market. Then we realise we need money for this. Our culture allows for this. We always make sure we do it better next time.

Prioritisation 1️⃣ 2️⃣ 3️⃣

We prioritise the hell out of our tasks. If it doesn’t fit into the current goal we are trying to reach, we don’t do it. And more important, we also review our prioritised tasks every week. When building ventures, priorities can and do shift quickly. For example, one week you might work on creating a front-end for Tillid. And then while working the next week, priorities change and you focus more on creating the story. This might seem wasteful. But lets up focus on the things we are doing the right thing. And together with the last one, we make sure we learn.

One team mentality 👨‍🎨 👩‍💻 👩‍💼 👨‍💻

Lastly, you need a mentality that you’re all in it together. This has a couple of facets.

You need a good team spirit. Everyone should at least not hate each other 😉.

You all need to work towards the same goal. If one succeeds, everyone succeeds and if one fails, all fail. Don’t fall into the us-them mentality.

You need a complementary and interdisciplinary team. Because you have one team, all aspects need to be there in the team. That means business, developers, marketing, managers… You need all aspects to succeed and you can’t do it with one division.

Building ventures in Agile

Many of these aspects seem obvious. Of course you need to have a good team spirit. Of course you need to know what to work on. But you also need to work on these things. It’s not easy to drop work on something half-way because there might be more important aspects. Or even that that venture is not useful anymore.