Who said that cookbooks had to be for cooking? In the world of technology, experts are cooking up some exemplary recipes for creating and updating software in an agile marketing frame of mind. Some key ingredients to making a software solution work include listening to customer feedback, testing, evaluating the competition, gaining an understanding of the marketplace and then executing continual updates based on your findings.
In a blog post titled, Ready, Fire, Aim – A Manifesto for Agile Marketing, Greg Meyer describes how to succeed at high speed during great ambiguity using the Agile Manifesto’s 12 principles for creating software. Interestingly enough, these same principles can just as eaily be applied to businesses. Meyer breaks down the 12 principles with brief descriptions and then writes in depth blog posts each. Check out the full article as well as the additional 12 blog posts by following the link above.
- Principal 1: Customer satisfaction and market acceptance – Even in everyday life, asking yourself the question “why” helps you to stay focused on the bigger picture. Developing software is the same, listen to customers, see what the competition is doing and then deliver. Without our customer’s feedback, we would never improve our products and would be stuck with stagnant software that would eventually become extinct.
- Principal 5: ABC – Always build content. Why you might ask? Because it helps to keep up the chaotic of your developers and you can even make some mistakes along the way. Keeping an eye on social media is key, so don’t ignore your Twitter feed! Everything is important.
- Principal 10: Keep it simple stupid – Don’t try to recreate the wheel with every project you start. See if anyone else has done something like it before and use that as a jumping off point for your project, presentation, survey, etc.
You may not look at cookbooks the same way again, but at least you have some more ideas about how to adopt Agile into your everyday work. Be sure to check out the rest of the article – I only explained three out of the twelve days to share. There is still a lot more information to read about! I think that it is important to understand Agile and see how it can truly make a difference when working on projects, creating software, and communicating within your company.
Your Turn
Before you take a look at the full story, what are some other key principles that you think might make up the manifesto?
Have you used any of these in your place of work? If so, how have they worked out for you?