Most Valuable Benefits and Advantages of Agile

With software development companies and corporates switching to Agile at a rapid rate, Agile has become a popular approach in product development management. The flexibility and iterative approach in Agile has helped companies deliver standardized products that meet the market demands.

Since the inception of ‘The Agile Manifesto’ in 2001, software developers have improvised over time and used it to their advantage. With a high success rate, companies using Agile have also witnessed an average growth rate of 60-80% in revenue and profit. 

Agile follows an incremental approach, where there is a continuous collaboration between the customer and the developers. This allows the developers to work on customer feedback and continuously make improvements, ensuring that the final product is meeting the required parameters.

In this article, we will understand several advantages of Agile and how it can benefit a product development management team. Let’s look into the advantages of Agile:

1. Achieving Customer Satisfaction

In agile product development, the customer is always kept in the loop to ensure the product deliverables are meeting the requirements. The customer is at the crux of the decision-making process, which creates transparency and overall customer satisfaction. 

The customer has the scope to analyze and share feedback during the product development, and it is quickly acted upon. The Agile approach aims at responding to changes quickly and doing away with errors.

The customer has a real-time understanding of the status of the product development and is involved thoroughly throughout the lifecycle of the product development. This results in greater customer retention as the customer feels valued and can meet his business goals.

2. High-quality Products 

In Agile product development, the work is divided into smaller, manageable units for efficient execution, and this makes each increment of the product with superior quality. With testing being an integral part of the execution process, the product is improvised and tested as many times as required, before each incremental delivery. 

The product managers and product owners make sure that the customer and the developers are on the same page after every sprint or iteration so that the issues can be addressed and every little aspect can be taken care of. 

This environment of consistent collaboration and feedback, even between developers, enables the Agile team to work on bug fixes, and code optimisation, improving the overall quality of the product. 

3. Continuous collaboration

Unlike traditional methods, where customers’ requirements are understood at the start of a product development and there is no scope for customer feedback during the development phase, Agile involves continuous customer collaboration.

This makes the product development visible to the stakeholders. customers are involved in the entire process, and they can pitch in their feedback in the decision-making meetings.

4. Increased transparency and risk reduction

Agile enables absolute transparency between development team members as well between the development team and customers.

This level of involvement creates transparency for the stakeholders and the developers alike, reducing the likeliness of risks. Agile focuses on maximising customer satisfaction and delivering value after each sprint or iteration.

Changes can be made in the backlog after each meeting, which automatically reduces the chances of risks in the future. 

5. Continuous Feedback Loop

In today’s world, no one really knows what to build in the product. We are constantly in a discovery mode. Hence, customers or users also don’t know what they need.

Continuous collaboration enables continuous feedback loop. This helps customers to understand what has been built and what can be improved, as well as helps the development team to understand what customers think of their recent product features.

6. Self-Organised Teams

An Agile team is compact and consists of team members who are not only self-organised but have also adopted the Agile mindset. Agile product developments are divided into smaller units among each team member by their skill set.

Agile team members can take complete ownership of their tasks and collaborate with other team members to remove bottlenecks in the product developments. Owing to the self-organising nature of an Agile team, the work gets done faster and with increased efficiency.

Moreover, Agile teams are usually cross-functional, this helps them to learn from each other and upskill while contributing to the overall growth of the team.

7. An environment of continuous improvement

Agile product developments work on a retrospective basis. Meetings are held regularly to understand the progress of a product development and retrospect on each aspect of the product’s development. This allows software developers to scrutinise their work and find out areas of opportunity if any. 

Such a model of working makes room for continuous improvement, consistently improving the standards of the deliverable. This is a great strategy to retain customer satisfaction and maintain the quality of the deliverables. 

One of the major advantages of working in an Agile way is that it offers unparalleled flexibility. This results in a working space that is adaptive to frequent changes and foresees possible risks and responds to them quickly. Such flexibility throughout the lifecycle of the product development aids in delivering high-end products.

To conclude, the level of productivity and accountability that a product development offers, in an Agile environment is incredible. With benefits that result in higher revenue and profit, Agile is the way to go for elite software developers and Fortune 500 companies. 

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