Episode 152: The Evolution of Agile: A Conversation with Joshua of Industrial Logic

In this episode of Product Thinking: Joshua Keievsky, Founder and CEO of Industrial Logic, joins Melissa Perri to discuss the evolution of Agility in business. Josh talks through his fantastic new book ‘The Joy of Agility’ and the six mantras he’s identified in the implementation of Agile working into business strategy, and the case studies he discovered and learned from along the way.

Josh describes himself as an early pioneer of the Agile movement, and has spent the past twenty seven years working with businesses to improve their workflows. He’s born witness to multiple technological advancements in the sector, and has worked first-hand on Agile implementations. In this episode, they talk through his book and discuss whether Agile working has a future.

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You’ll hear them talk about:

08:30 - Agile is an adjective, not a noun. It’s not separate from product management, organization or Dev Ops. To be agile is to be quick, resourceful, and adaptive.
10:30 - The art of slowing down to speed up. Josh talks us through the first few of his Six Mantras from his book, mainly focusing on the importance of understanding when to be slow and when to be fast. The workload that goes into product development can be time-consuming, and skipping steps such as market research and analytics can lead to mediocre products being released and failing. From a software perspective, Josh talks about the art of chartering and the benefits to bringing multiple teams onto the same page: taking the opportunity to slow down and get your ducks in a row, before speeding up once more.
23:20 - Start Minimal and Evolve. Josh tells us how this applies to product management through the example of a Car Rental website, and how it works to involve all the key teams and build in risk management to the process. The conversation then turns to the case study of Chrysler’s Payment System, and the benefits they saw to starting their system small and evolving from there.
30:30 - What does Agility have to do with cross-functional collaboration? Josh tells us how businesses are often built around needless delays: not the good slow, but the bad slow! And suggests tactics on how to make this initiative a success. The conversation continues to discuss workload and delegation, and how he helps executives visualize problems their teams are facing. Do you say ‘no’ enough?

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Previous guests include: Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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