Agile — Why We Believe It Is Good for Us at Kin?

The KIN market is evolving as you read this post, and it’s very vibrant, much like the entire cryptocurrency environment. Alex Frenkel, the head of product design at KIK, declares on the “KIN product vision”, that our main goal is to create a shared winning and contributing cryptocurrency community.

We at KIN strongly believe that people should be able to trade goods and services over the virtual ecosystem using cryptocurrencies in the same way they do today with bills and credit cards.

However, since the KIN product is a newbie in a constantly changing market and both still have a long way to go, the uncertainty of which road to take is even greater.

We decided that the Agile way will be the best for us to use. The Agile manifesto is a straight forward document offering a practical methodology. Of course, every team would have to slightly adapt it to meet its own unique needs.

So why do we think Agile is the best way for KIN?

Agile is a time boxed, iterative approach to delivery.

Instead of handling all the planning upfront, like in Waterfall methodology for example, the Agile approach focuses on being lean. Agile commonly translates to producing a set of minimum viable products (MVPs) over short periods of time, gradually improving with each iteration.

When coming to examine our product, which is actually a set of products, it seems that short-term MVPs are the only way to provide quick-to-market solutions.
These MVPs will help us learn what are the community needs while receiving feedback and of course accommodate to the rapid market fluctuations.

We at KIN are inspired to create synergetic processes, where our cross-functional teams will work cooperatively, each on a unique aspect of the product. The teams can actually work independently, whether its on the blockchain or the ecosystem, but also share resources when joint-team efforts are required.

The community’s constant feedback is invaluable for continuous improvement of the product and the Agile methodology enables us to adapt to these changing requirements.

There are also cons to working in Agile: one of them is the indefinite timeline for the final product. Since we are breaking the timeline into tiny bits of small MVPs that are developed in relatively short iterations, the final product and roadmap are not definite and there is uncertainty.

Conveniently this aligns well with the KIN market dynamics. There is no such thing as a ‘final product’. Our aim is to improve the current ecosystem of the cryptocurrency market and to enable a free, easy-to-use and friendly trading environment. This, however, can be carried out by multiple products, features and services. There is no one final, complete “product” that can or even should provide all.

Another benefit of the Agile methodology is that it aligns well with our open source approach: it allows other members of the community the ability to contribute, share and improve the ecosystem and the cryptocurrency trading zone to become a better place.

Agile significantly increases productivity and reduces time-to-benefits.

It enables flexibility in the face of rapidly-changing requirements, and produces a product that meets evolving business goals.

The Agile process benefits KIN by helping it to:

• Increase the quality of the deliverables
• Cope better with changes (and expect the changes)
• Provide better estimates while spending less time creating them
• Be more in control of the project schedule and status

In conclusion, we believe that the Agile process fits KIN because:

• KIN products are newbies to the company and the market
• Time to market is crucial
• The market and its requirements change all the time and at a very fast pace
• The teams can share knowledge, information and
  resources to reach better results

What’s next?

Since we believe in flexibility and the independence of our development teams, each team is currently testing the various Agile implementations as well as project management tools.

Our R&D teams are currently testing various project management tools, such as JIRA, Monday and others. In each of these tools we are going to examine the following issues:

1. Can the tool be used for SCRUM or Kanban implementations?
2. How well it reflects the overall work on a timeline?
3. Is it easy-to-use and friendly for the R&D team?
4. How well it reflects the process itself, i.e. in progress, in QA, pending release etc.
5. Are the search and linking capabilities sufficient for long term usage?
6. Does it enable to easily reflect the KIN road map to our community?

We will continue to update you on the process and on the decisions made. And will consequently continue to the next phase of choosing the proper Agile implementation.

Thank you