Agile in Plain English?

Written by: S. Pradono Suryodiningrat

So, we know that lean mindset is a way of building a product or business without wasting resources without spending the money, until we have to. But aren’t they the same as Agile? Well, we’re going to talk about agile and why it’s so important for a product manager to understand it.

Agile is just a way of applying that lean mindset to software development, and agile as you know is an adjective, you can say something is agile. But when people especially in the software or tech industry say the word agile, they’re usually meeting Agile Software Development which is just sort of a project management framework for software development

So, what is Agile?

Agile is an iterative method to developing software where we group things into small batches and do them in order to not waste resources.

Let’s imagine that you are writing down the features that you think an app should have. And you come up with ten features and you think that those features are absolutely necessary for the users to want your app. If we are doing this in an Agile way, we would probably only research and develop the first two to five features that we think are most important. We would take those features and we will say that these are the most important ones, we design them, we research them, we develop them, we release them, and we see what the user feedback is on those two to five features before we go on and develop the rest of the features.