Business Lessons from Agile Development

As a small startup with limited resources and outsized ambitions we have to constantly juggle our technical, and business, roadmap to take advantage of new opportunities and information. We've adopted the use of Agile development practices, or at least a variation of it. The purest SCRUMMaster would talk about backlogs, sprints, and iteration - basically that means planning and prioritizing, short bursts of activity, then improvement once you see what you have to work with. Why do community magazine publishers care about this? Because this process is useful for business too.

It's too easy to get consumed with the work at hand and work head-down without coming up for air. Some people call this working in the business rather than working on the business. Don't get me wrong, this is a useful skill to possess but if you get off track (or in our business the track itself moves) then when you do come up to surveil your surroundings you'll find you're lost. More than that, an Agile approach teaches that some planning is good but too much is a waste of time - I may be paraphrasing.

Knowing when to keep moving full speed ahead as opposed to when to surface is a tricky thing and definitely something we haven't mastered but I have two suggestions both of which are probably pretty obvious. 1. Go see customers, as I tweeted about my visit with folks who publish425 & South Sound Magazines, getting that infusion of fresh perspective and energy is a great reality check against what you're currently consumed with. 2. Schedule times to step back and adhere to it. If you don't make time you'll find yourself working on those things that are merely urgent and not necessarily important.

It wouldn't be a corporate blog post if I didn't gratuitously plug one of our services. Giving publishers and their teams the ability to step back, even if only for a short time, to share and learn from each other is the reason we created the members-only professional networking environment on MagazineConnect.com. There are a lot of publishers and each are dipping their toes into new things, we bring them together to share and learn actionable insights for their business while still leaving them time to run your business. End of sales pitch.

I'll close with a football analogy now that we're heading into the Fall - great offenses need to be able to pass the ball and run the ball. Sure, one-sided offenses can be effective for a while or against a given opponent but champions can do both. They're balanced, able to adapt, agile. Make sure your business is balanced.