If you're innovating in digital, you're probably using some form of Agile, and if you're not, you might want to consider it. But what is Agile and how do we know if it's working? I would say that the core of Agile, the manifesto, which is actually only 68 words long, it's really more a set of outcomes that you're trying to get to than one single prescription for how to get there. Every team gets there differently because the circumstances of every team are different. And that's both kind of the opportunity and the challenge of Agile. And also, the charter for our course is how do I help you get to, one, better outcomes for your user, help you get better and better at delivering something valuable to them. And two, help you work better and better with your team to do that. And the great thing about Agile is that it does a nice job of helping you work on those two things simultaneously in a complimentary way. Now, how do we know if we're getting better and better at Agile? because that's really the point. There isn't one single Agile that if you do it in one certain way, it'll always work for everybody all the time. I think it's useful to unpack it in this product pipeline. Explicitly or implicitly, we all go from certain observations about what might be valuable to our user to release product. Some digital experience that we're putting in front of them and we're hoping is engaging for them, that they use it, and that it makes them better off. And then I think a good way to look at whether we're getting better and better at doing that is with these three areas, continuous design, Agile development, and continuous delivery. With continuous design, we're asking, are we getting better and better at making sure that what we're releasing is seeing really high engagement? And are we making space for our team by building fewer things better, with more purpose and more focus on what actually matters to the user? With Agile development, we're primarily really looking at, as a team, are we getting better and better at releasing software and getting more output out the door? Because as much as we need to balance outcomes that we're getting to with output that we create, we do still have to get software out the door. And then with continuous delivery, we're looking at, are we able to update and release really quickly? Amazon famously releases every 11.6 seconds, they're learning fast, their teams are able to release easily, and they make a habit out of doing that. It's well instrumented into their Agile cadences and the way the teams work together. How are we going to do that? Well, let's talk about that in the context of the five courses in the specialization. In course one, Agile Meets Design Thinking, we're going to look at how we bring better inputs into the process. If we don't bring good inputs into the process, everything else we're doing could be generating waste and not adding up to anything for our team, even if we do it really well. In course two, Hypothesis-Driven Development, we're going to look at this whole pipeline. And we're going to look at how we unpack it Into a series of testable hypotheses so that as we work with our team, we're creating a culture of experimentation and a focus on testable ideas that we test appropriately. Because there are very different tools that we use to test these different hypothesis areas. And we kind of need to know whether we ought to be going all the way through the cycle and releasing product, or, for example, running a design sprint, going out, learning more about our user. In course three, Agile Analytics, we're going to look at how we pair design and analytics and how we make a regular habit of that to bring observation into everything that we're doing so that we can iterate more purposefully. So that we're asking and answering good questions as we go from qualitative to quantitative observations. How do we pair those and use them together to improve our practice of Agile? In course four, Managing an Agile Team, we're going to look at the underlying jobs to be done in software development. How do we get better at learning what's valuable? How do we get better at making good, testable decisions, clear decisions about what to build? How do we get better at managing our code base and all the infrastructure associated with that? And how do we get better at interfacing with external stakeholders? A lot of jobs to running a product program or a project program around digital. How do we pick and choose from all the different stuff available, all the different methods and practices of Agile? Apply those purposefully, test them out for our team, and decide which ones are working for us and which ones we should change? And then finally, in the capstone course, we're going to look at all these things together and think about how we apply them more purposefully.
