Agile Product Development: How to Design Innovative Products That Create Customer Value

Agile Product Development: How to Design Innovative Products That Create Customer Value

by Tathagat Varma
Released November 2015
Publisher(s): Apress
ISBN: 9781484210673

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Book description

Discover what it takes to develop products that blow your users away—and take market share from your competitors. This book will explain how the principles behind agile product development help designers, developers, architects, and product managers create awesome products; and how to look beyond a shiny user interface to build a great product. Most importantly, this book will give you a shared framework for your product development team to collaborate effectively.

Product development involves several key activities—including ideation, discovery, design, development, and delivery—and yet too many companies and innovators focus on just a few of them much to the detriment of the product’s success in the marketplace. As a result we still continue to see high failure rates in new product development, be it inside organizations or startups. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, these failures are largely avoidable.

In the last fifteen years, advances in agile software development, lean product development, human-centered design, design thinking, lean startups and product delivery have helped improve individual aspects of product development. However, not enough guidance has been available to integrate them in the context of the product development life cycle.

Until now. Product developer extraordinaire Tathagat Varma in Agile Product Development integrates individual knowledge areas into a field manual for product developers. Organized in the way an idea germinates, sprouts, and grows, the book synthesizes the body of knowledge in a pragmatic way that is more natural to the entire product creation process rather than from individual practices that constitute it.

In today’s hyper-innovative world, being first to the market, or delivering feature-loaded products, or even offering the latest technology doesn’t guarantee success anymore. Sure, those elements are all needed in the right measures, but they are not sufficient by themselves. And getting it right couldn’t be more important: Building products that deliver awesome user experiences is the top challenge facing businesses today, especially in a post-Apple world where user experience and design has been elevated to a cult status.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Apress Business
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. About the Author
  8. About the Technical Reviewer
  9. Acknowledgments
  10. Introduction
  11. Chapter1: Preamble
    1. Spectrum of Problems
      1. Solving Simple Problems
      2. Solving Complicated and Complex Problems
      3. Solving Anarchy Problems
    2. Solving Problems in Software Development
    3. Agility in Pre-software Days
    4. Re-examining the Agile Manifesto
      1. The Agile Manifesto
    5. Accelerating the Agility
    6. What’s next?
  12. Chapter2: Discover
    1. Accidental Discovery vs. Directed Innovation
    2. Lone Genius vs. Cross-Functional Team
    3. Slow Market Research vs. Rapid Experimentation
    4. Role-Based Innovation vs. Ability-Based Innovation
    5. Ideas and Techniques
      1. Brainstorming
      2. Gamestorming
      3. Bodystorming
      4. Trystorming
      5. Hackathons
      6. Medici Effect
    6. Conclusion
  13. Chapter3: Deliberate
    1. Stealth Mode Development
      1. What is the problem?
      2. Who are my customers?
      3. What do they want?
    2. Collaborative Development
    3. Prototyping
      1. Back of Napkin
      2. Paper Prototyping
      3. Wireframes
      4. Mock-ups
    4. Design Thinking
    5. Google Ventures’ Design Sprints
      1. Before the Sprint: Prepare
      2. Day 1: Understand
      3. Day 2: Diverge
      4. Day 3: Decide
      5. Day 4: Prototype
      6. Day 5: Validate
    6. Customer Development, Lean Startup, and Business Model Canvas
      1. Business Model Canvas
      2. Lean Canvas
    7. Conclusion
  14. Chapter4: Describe
    1. Old-School Documentation
    2. Product Vision
      1. Elevator Pitch
      2. Product Vision Box
      3. Press Release
    3. Product Roadmap
    4. Product Backlog
    5. Sprint Backlog
    6. User Stories
    7. Feature Prioritization
      1. Kano Analysis
      2. MoSCoW
      3. Financial Measures
      4. Pugh Matrix
    8. Conclusions
  15. Chapter5: Design
    1. Design as Differentiator?
    2. What is Design?
    3. What is Good Design?
    4. Human-Centered Design
      1. User Personas
      2. Empathy Map
      3. Customer Journey Map
    5. Lean UX
    6. What about Software Design?
    7. Conclusion
  16. Chapter6: Develop
    1. The World Before
    2. Extreme Programming
    3. Agile
      1. Agile Manifesto
      2. The PM Declaration of Interdependence
    4. Scrum
    5. Lean
    6. Kanban
      1. Foundational Principles
      2. Core Practices
    7. Agile Engineering Practices
      1. User Requirements
      2. Design, Development, and Testing
    8. Conclusion
  17. Chapter7: Deliver
    1. Integration
    2. Shipping
    3. Software Configuration Management (SCM)
    4. Continuous Integration (CI)
    5. Continuous Delivery
    6. Continuous Deployment (CD)
    7. DevOps
    8. Conclusions
  18. Index

Product information

  • Title: Agile Product Development: How to Design Innovative Products That Create Customer Value
  • Author(s): Tathagat Varma
  • Release date: November 2015
  • Publisher(s): Apress
  • ISBN: 9781484210673