ⓒ 2023 Inertia. All Rights Reserved.
5 Reasons Your Physical Product Development Is Stuck And How To Get It Unstuck
Over the past 18 years since the founding of Inertia, we’ve had a lot of...
“It’s hard to have an actual increment (tangible deliverable) in a reasonable time frame. We tried extending a sprint long enough to have a real increment and it did not go well. It dragged on too long and everyone lost sight of what the original goal was. Right now we’re pretty much planning week by week which is working well – but it means we rarely have an actual increment. That being said, I don’t think it really matters if we’re not doing real scrum, as long as it works, which it does! It has been very productive to get everyone reviewing the upcoming milestones on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Pretty much keeping everyone in the loop makes people feel more accountable.”
“Initially I laid out detailed tasks for everyone, with DoD (Definition of Done) etc. Then we would decide on difficulty or time as a group. Now I’ll put in high level tasks only, explain them in the sprint planning meeting, and people can break them down into more detailed tasks and estimate times by themselves. I would say this is faster and gives the team more ownership as laying out all the sprint tasks by myself was very time consuming. This has been the biggest learning for me I think. Trying to find the sweet spot of how much direction to give in the tasks.”
“Our first approach on Scrum wasn’t good. We spent a lot of time planning, but then realized that we had to change the plan maybe every week as things changing. So, we started to take things more loosely and having shorter planning session but more frequently. That way I could respond to change faster and better. I feel like 90% of the benefit of agile is planning more. The team started to getting better at task definition and in terms of what everyone will work on every 2 weeks. I don’t need to tell the team what to do, I just tell them the big picture, and they create the tasks. They became better and better at it.”
“Its been a great task tracker. Most of my projects have been fairly contained and estimating time and tasks has been fairly easy. I would be curious as how this would work with projects where there is more exploration, trial and error type tasks. I’m still having a difficult time understanding how tasks are translated to time, we’ve evolved from tracking hours to points to percentages and now using an amalgamation of time and percentages… its getting better, but I think there’s still room to improve. Being able to show the client on a weekly bases a really high level progress of the project has been great. i.e. we are 80% completed… etc”
“Our retrospectives have really improved – especially as the teams are getting more comfortable at contributing to how each other works, how the process is working, and what could be changed to work better. The concept of demonstratable prototype has been a process of learning how to shift our mindset as to what constitutes a demonstratable prototype. This is probably one of the biggest challenges in adopting Agile for hardware. Some examples of demonstratable prototypes are obviously, 3d printed prototypes, design reviews, product testing programs, etc. Another big step forward since implementing Agile is including our customer teams (external) to our sprint management process. This helps align different disciplines and geographically disparate groups.”
Our journey down the Agile rabbit hole is far from over. Felipe has been working on a “How to / Roadmap” guide that reflects how we have adapted to use Agile for hardware development – which we’ll be happy to share shortly.
In the meantime, we’ve included the original post from back in February which includes our original guide on Agile for hardware and some helpful references.
Recently, one of our product teams at Inertia began experimenting with The Agile Framework to see if and how we could improve how we maximize innovation and manage our projects. I use the word experimenting deliberately, for a few reasons:
Will it make us more productive? More innovative? More nimble? Happier? More empowered to make decisions? These are all lofty outcomes and since Inertia’s bar is already set extremely high when it comes to quality and customer service, Agile has a lot of heavy lifting to do before it becomes established as our de facto way of doing things.
Join our newsletter to stay up to date on features and releases.
In the meantime, we’ve included the original post from back in February which includes our original guide on Agile for hardware and some helpful references.
Recently, one of our product teams at Inertia began experimenting with The Agile Framework to see if and how we could improve how we maximize innovation and manage our projects. I use the word experimenting deliberately, for a few reasons:
Will it make us more productive? More innovative? More nimble? Happier? More empowered to make decisions? These are all lofty outcomes and since Inertia’s bar is already set extremely high when it comes to quality and customer service, Agile has a lot of heavy lifting to do before it becomes established as our de facto way of doing things.
In the meantime, we’ve included the original post from back in February which includes our original guide on Agile for hardware and some helpful references.
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