Empower your Team to Build Better Products
by Julia Fabiszewski and Max Wilkinson
For every agile business, the ultimate goal is to be able to respond quickly to market changes and customer needs. Extreme programming, or XP, exists to deliver this approach to product development. The goal of XP is to empower teams to deliver a product that both excites users, and solves their needs.
What people get wrong about XP is thinking that it is only a method of software engineering. The truth is that XP benefits the entire team — and the organization, as a whole.
XP is an approach to software development that utilizes automation, simplicity, and continuous feedback in order to produce high-quality software that can be quickly modified. The speed at which the team can respond to new information is critical — it allows for the software to evolve as the team learns about their customer, in real-time.
In order to work at this pace, the team must embrace the idea of a minimum viable product.
An MVP is not a perfect product.
An MVP is not a polished product.
An MVP is not a finished product
An MVP is a version of your product that will provide your team with the ability to gain insights from real users. These learnings are quickly incorporated into the product. As a result, teams that implement XP practices are able to explore and refine a potential business opportunity very quickly.
So, how do you implement XP on your team?
The best way is to foster the XP mindset.
The core practices of XP include paired programming, test-driven development, refactoring, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. These are practices most commonly applied to the software engineering team — which makes it easy to understand why XP is so closely tied with that job role.
These techniques allow the team to keep their code simple, clean, and tested, so that they are able to quickly and confidently modify the software in response to changing customer requirements. When engineers can modify code faster, designers can conduct more customer interviews, and product managers can run more experiments. The entire team benefits, not just the engineers.
These practices are not exclusive to software engineers.
Just as it is important to keep code clean, simple, and easily updated; it is also important to apply these standards to design wireframes and product backlogs.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery are shared methods. Designers should be just as dedicated to the process of continuously updating sketches and delivering them to developers. Likewise, continuous product delivery, from a holistic view, should be important to product managers, product owners, and stakeholders. Promoting weekly iterations and demos are practices the entire team can take on.
Imagine if your team operated this way. How much more value could you create? How much less stress would you experience by working smarter instead of just harder? Now imagine if every team at your company operated this way. It would completely change the problems you solve and the products you create. That is the potential power of an agile business.
