Although the agile methodology is often talked about as a process for managing digital or physical project delivery, the reality is that Agile addresses cost much more than process. Or, at least, it’s a process for managing cost, rather than a method for optimizing process.
In most design-to-build workflows, whether you’re building a digital product like a website or a physical building or consumer product, the design phase is the cheaper of the two, and it’s the more easily reversed. After all, sketches, designs, and prototypes are easily tweaked.
When you start committing that design to a built product, through teams of engineers or subcontractors, changes become much harder to make and much more expensive.
…you have to give real people functionality, tools, or experiences that they actually want.
As a methodology, Agile ensures that the team working on digital products is focused on delivering real user value. (You can’t use Agile to build a house!) Creating user value is a jargon-ish way to say: you have to give real people functionality, tools, or experiences that they actually want. The worst thing you can do when you are constrained by cost (and every project is constrained by cost) is spend time and money to design and then build a whole load of functionality that, only after it’s built, you put in front of real users and realize they don’t want it.
Even if there are long gaps between cycles, the intervening periods can be used to gather user feedback, iterate on design and functionality.
Some product teams might argue that Agile would be “overkill” for deploying a simple marketing website, but the reality is that such websites shouldn’t be treated as static, finished objects, even if there is only budget to get them designed and built the first time around.
Even if there are long gaps between cycles, the intervening periods can be used to gather user feedback, iterate on design and functionality, and even of minor details of the site, like improving a signup form, or A/B testing the color of a call to action (CTA) button. These details, navigation experiences and whole pages can always be improved, and returning to an Agile workflow can be an effective way to ensure that the team building or managing a digital product, even if it’s a simple website, is time (and therefore cost) that is focused on delivering real value for users.
