Hi, my name's Alex and I'm the lead instructor for the Agile Specialization on Coursera. If you're not familiar, Agile is an innovation friendly approach to product development. And why might you want to learn about this? Well, if we look at the state of software development, it's pretty robust. There's a lot of great technology out there and there's a lot of great software being produced, but there's also a lot of waste. By some tallies, it's as little as 20% of features that users actually use. And that's unsuccessful products. The failure rates for new products, for IT projects, to me, they're astonishingly high. So how can you solve this problem? Well, I think there's two parts. One, we need to focus on creating valuable software that's really relevant to users. And two innovation is on the lips in minds of just about everybody in the boredroom and probably everywhere else too. How do we keep our company innovative? Well, guess what's in the intersections of this two things? Yup, you guessed it. It's Agile. Agile is a systematic approach to innovating in meaningful ways that entire teams can use to work together towards better outcomes. What are you going to learn in the specialization about how to do this? Well, in Course 1, you'll learn how to go out and talk to users and find out what's really on their A list and what they really need. Now, how will you find time to do that? Well, in Course 2, you'll learn how to create time boxed iterations called design sprints, where you go out, you get that discovery done, and you bring back actionable inputs so you can drive to more valuable software. In a lot of ways, Agile's a pretty big departure from traditional management. Your job is to create self-organizing teams that work in these collaborative, small batches. That's what you'll learn how to do in Course 3. Agile is also very experiment driven. We do things in small batches so that we can try something, observe the results and then try it again. And that's what you'll learn in Course 4, is how to run experiments with Agile and create a culture of experimentation. So I hope you'll consider joining me on the Agile Specialization. I look forward to seeing you.