What is an Agile Mindset? Six years later

At the end of 2011 I wrote about what makes an agile mindset (in my opinion) and even made a fancy infographic about it:

It concentrates on how people think about their colleagues as humans vs. cogs; whether they have a growth vs. a fixed mindset; iterative product development vs. extensive planning and more. These are all still valid, but I can add another set of examples today.

The past few weeks I have often thought about how conversations changed at sipgate over the course of the years and why it is much easier and more fun to get things done than in the beginning. So here’s a list of behaviours and how they changed:

“It can’t be done!” -> “We have to take X into account”

In the beginning, many a discussion about potential features revolved around a central theme of what we can’t do. There seemed to be an awful lot of things we couldn’t do, despite the fact that we were working with software. If we created it in the first place, we can also change it. Made me so angry, I ranted about it here.

These conversations have been replaced by “If we want to do that we have to take care of X and Y. Oh, and Z will be tricky, too. From the top of my head we look at a two month effort. Is this feature worth two months to us?” A much more productive conversation!

“Clearly A is better!” “No, B!” -> “Can we just try it?”

We used to discuss options endlessly. Fruitless hypothesizing. Nowadays one of us will rather soon ask something along the lines of: “Can we try it out? (What would it cost to just try? Can we decide this or who else would need to take this decision with us? How easy is it to roll this back if it doesn’t work out? Who might we confuse with this?)”

And the number of theories you can easily put into practice to see what happens is surprisingly high. I’d estimate about 90% of the time we realize that, yep, we could just try it out without repercussions.

? -> “Where’s the value to customers?”

Here I’m not sure what was the focus before. I suspect there wasn’t any focus. But nowadays if you want anything done you’re better prepared to explain how it is of value to a customer. Otherwise, fat chance!

As my colleague Mathias so beautifully put it about how we build websites: “At first we designed desktop first, then mobile first, then content first and finally: Purpose first.” What is it that we want the customer to achieve on a given page? This approach makes decisions and trade-offs clearer and points you into the direction you need to take.

Summary: Appreciative and constructive

In general the whole company’s vibe has become much more appreciative and constructive. There are hardly any cynics left. Instead we’re pointing out what’s already going well and look for solutions where it’s not. Most days, anyway. Nobody’s perfect 😉
It is a highly satisfying way to work!


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