Why is it that so many hardware teams get stuck when using Agile? Why does that often create more overhead and frustration for them? And why do they still endure long, slow loopbacks, wasting valuable time and resources fixing problems in late development that could have been found earlier?
Software and hardware teams face different problems. But some Agile Software experts suggest that the necessary solutions are often the same. We’ve seen too many implementations of Agile Software tools and practices that just don’t translate to physical products.
The authors have personally had to untangle many physical product teams who used Agile in ways that slowed them down, and sacrificed the teams’ ability to deliver the full potential for their products.
When Agile Gets Physical reveals how you’ll use the best parts of agile to accelerate time-to-market with proven methods, and:
- Why the common problems hardware teams have experienced for decades can easily be avoided.
- How you’ll get a stronger product that beats your competition to market up to 50%+ faster by building a reusable library of resources to eliminate unnecessary reinvention and rework.
- Why the key to better hardware development is a simple reframing of important decisions to make them at the right time, with the right people and the best available knowledge.
- How to integrate hardware and software development teams to accelerate the late stages of development.
- What Agile Software advocates get wrong about physical product development and why abandoning agile principles isn’t the answer.
Katherine and Kathy’s combined experience in agile for physical product development will show how to keep the benefits of agile without force-fitting the wrong methods or adapting them beyond recognition.
Once you get a closer look, you’ll be wondering why you weren’t using this method from the start.
Who is this book for?
This book is for anyone working on physical product development. That includes but is not limited to:
- Chief Technology Officers and Chief Science Officers
- VPs of Engineering, Product Development, Innovation and Research & Development
- Product Development Project Leaders
- System Architects and other Technical Leads
- Scientists and Engineers, including Biologists, Chemists, Physicists, Mechanical and Electrical Engineers working towards products for commercialization.
- Anyone responsible for teams creating physical products.
- Because hardware and software teams often run parallel to each other, this book is also for Software Engineers, Scrum Masters and Software Project Leaders who’ll need to know what the hardware teams are doing, and why they’re doing it differently.
What do you mean by a physical product?
Anything that must be sourced, produced, distributed and then supported in the field. This includes everything from consumer electronics to food and beverage products to pharmaceuticals and renewable power generation systems.
While many software engineers can make changes at any point in the process by releasing new code, physical products are much harder to change once the team starts moving the product into production.
This is the core difference that drives When Agile Gets Physical. If you want the speed, flexibility and responsiveness of agile principles without force-fitting methods that were designed to solve a different set of problems, this book is for you.
