The Perfect Marriage: Agile & Growth-Driven Design

 I'm blessed to be married to the woman of my dreams! We've been married for more than 34 years, and she still takes my breath away just by walking in the room. But it's definitely NOT a perfect marriage, mostly because I'm such a far cry from being a perfect husband. (Pssst... she's not perfect either, as was evidenced this morning when she burned my breakfast.) All marriages experience times of strain and struggle, and ours is no exception. But the principals associated with agile project management techniques, and growth-driven design are such a perfect, seemingly strainless match, that you might conclude that they were cut from the same cloth. And you'd be right.

Agile Project Management

Largely as a result of the failure rate of large scale development efforts (despite micro-managed projects), agile software development evolved in the mid to late 1990s, offering hope and providing excellent results. It culminated in the Agile Manifesto in 2001, which offers the following twelve principles:

1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software
2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development
3. Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
7. Working software is the principal measure of progress
8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential
11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly

According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, the definition of Agile Software Development is as follows:

Agile software development describes a set of principles for software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross-functional teams. It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

As it turns out, cross-functional teams working together to produce rapid results—with a commitment to continuous improvement—is a perfect fit for developing websites that provide a real ROI! Growth driven design 

Growth Driven Design

We are huge proponents of growth-driven design for websites and would always prefer to create something fast and make it fantastic over time, rather than taking months and months to make an educated guess at the design, and let it sit for years, proving that the guess was just slightly off (or in some cases, the guess might have been fine at the time, but the times, they are a changin'). As I've confessed before, like most everyone else, we have done a lot of traditional website development. But growth-driven design has largely evolved out of the combination of the shift to inbound marketing and agile project management techniques. Indeed, both agile and GDD share a number of similar attributes. Perhaps the following list of GDD principals will sound familiar:

1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of website iterations
2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development
3. Working website is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
7. An effective website is the principal measure of progress
8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential
11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly

The Marriage

While originally employed almost entirely within the IT world, agile project management is starting to make its way into the agency world, especially agencies such as ours that specialize in inbound marketing, content marketing, and customer growth-driven design. Inbound/content marketing are not campaign-based, short-term endeavors. Rather, they reflect an ongoing commitment to a long-term strategic goal. GDD provides the perfect methodology to manage website projects, and agile project management disciplines allow us to manage all of our clients' marketing initiatives within the same construct. We are excited about the synergies that these two approaches bring to marketing and are extremely encouraged by how it promises to powerfully serve our clients.

While it may be true that no marriage is perfect, the marriage of growth driven design and agile project management in the pursuit of excellence offers the opportunity to drive marketing results to new levels. We are pleased to be among the agencies that are hosting this newlywed couple and look forward to witnessing many years of marital bliss. If you'd like to learn more about this happy couple and how it can help you execute reliably consistent inbound marketing strategies, please let us know.