You should stop following Agile Methodologies.
Blindly following Agile Methodologies is not the path you should follow in your work if you aim success and a remarkable performance.
Agile Methodologies are, undoubtedly, one of the most common topics when talking about subjects such as Product, Development and Design, but we need to talk about them differently this time: you should definitely not follow them blindly.
How to fully benefit from agile methodologies
When we talk about Agile Methodologies, we can probably read about and discover a billion different methodologies we could follow and apply in our work, but there is one crucial thing that needs to be considered: Product Thinking. As I have previously said in my Medium article about it, we need to analyse and adapt tools, methodologies and frameworks to our reality to make them even more powerful and useful.
Blindly following Agile Methodologies might not be as efficient and useful as adapting them, since we need to think about different necessities, scenarios and pain points that might not be exactly what the methodology in question itself was created to be used for. This is where creativity and experience need to be combined and come in to potencialize methodologies and turn them into what you, your reality, your product and your user/customer really need.
Furthermore, you do not need to fully recreate something to be innovative, innovation is not just disruptive and radical, it is also incremental; you just need to modify something — even if it is just a simple detail— to adapt it to your specific need the way that suits you best. This modification could be as simple as changing the order of the Design Thinking process, adding a quick stage or detail to it or whatever you find that may potencialize your work and your results.
Another simpler way of adapting methodologies than creating something new out of nowhere is fusing different things to serve your need. We already have combinations such as Scrumban, which is the combination of Scrum and Kanban, and many more that might be more adequate to your case than one of them applied isolated.
How to innovate if you are struggling
Innovating is not always easy, it requires some creativity, time, deep understanding of the problem or necessity you want to act on and some knowledge about design, tools or frameworks, per example, to enrich your solution-creation process and facilitate it. Unfortunately, I cannot give you a magic formula to innovate and solve the exact problem you’re currently facing, but I can give you some food for thought, insights and useful tools to help you get there.
One good recommendation is to read about different methodologies and different combinations to open your mind to a few ways of best profiting from them and how other people have adapted them to their own necessities, as well as stimulating other people from your team or company to thinking about it to gather even more ideas and perspectives. Undoubtedly, one of the most important parts of innovation is diversity and team work, so please do not ignore this essential part of the innovation process.
If you have any experiences to share, suggestions or questions, feel free to comment them! I would love to know what you think about this topic, this article and read about different perspectives and your experiences about fusing or adapting methodologies or other various kinds of tools.
