failure and agility
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
Emmanuel
Levi-Valensi
• Your contact for everything startup
Startup guy @ Microsoft France
• Software • Support • Visibility • And more
Bizspark:
• Or [email protected]
@blaise_v
Blaise
Vignon
• Consultancy & agile web and mobile development
Founder/GM People in Action
• Value driven • Innovation • User Experience • And more
Lean and agile practicioner:
• Or [email protected]
@PIA_Emmanuel
A sad statistic
Source : Illusions of Entrepreneurship Scott Shane (US Data, all industries)
Proportion of New Businesses Founded in 1992 Still Alive By Year. Most startup failures are
due to running out of money before having the right product There can be other causes (WCR, founder shoutfest, litigation) But not in the context of this talk
The following slides were built with
software engineering in mind
Software engineering is • Highly creative • Very interdependant on coworkers • Loosely coupled
In short, it is like many other startup functions • Marketing • PR/Communication • Business Development • Product design
The learning from Software Engineering have been applied to broader fields
The longer the project, the likelier the
failure
….because it is the less clear what success
looks like …
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
10 100 1000 10000 100000
% o
f p
roje
ct r
eq
uir
em
en
t ch
ange
s
Project size (measured in function points, yes, we know…)
… and noiіse levels can get out of
control…
Undefined
Well defined
Requ
irem
ents
Technology (project environment in
general)
Mat
ure
Cutt
ing
edge
Complex Anarchy
…but do we know why projects should be
big?
Only 20% of features are used
often
… and designing the wrong thing is
easy…
(we do not always know what the customer will look like)
Project (and startup) management can be
like this
Inefficient way of working
The « break-down and specialize »
management method leads to many wastes:
Stock of useless functionalities, documentation
High cost of coordination and communication
Agility proposes a different management
paradiіgm…
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Source: http://agilemanifesto.org/
Important Agile Principles
Customer satisfaction is the main goal
Intrinsic quality
Measure to objectivize
Collective commitment
Agility proposes a different management
paradiіgm…
Agile way of delivering
The Scrum process
Fail fast, fail early
• As we are delivering fast, we can harvest
positive and negative feedbacks
• As we accept changes, we can take into
account these feedbacks and adapt our plans
• Feedback is more precious than perfection
Tips to accelerate failure (or success)
• Instead of building a full product or
service, prototype it
• There are several prototype types:
Mechanical turk Pinocchio The Provincial The Minimal Viable Product
Agile Marketing
Cust omer discovery
Cust omer Val idat ion
Cust omer c reat ion
Company bu ilding
Validate market hypothesis
Imagine and validate the MVP Generate demand
Accelerate!
Some great books…
http://institut-agile.fr
