MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center asked me to give an Agile Product Management workshop for their Hacking IAP course. The course is a special seminar in management they’re doing for MIT student entrepreneurs. It takes place over the IAP (January) term and is open to all MIT students that have startups already underway.

The first week of the course is a series of guest lectures from industry experts on how to get shit done (that’s where I come in). After that, the course serves as a mini-accelerator with students applying what they’ve learned to their startups and receiving mentoring from myself and the other lecturers. The course concludes with a demo day at the end of the term – which I can’t wait to see!

Here are my slides – I actually beefed this up a little for SlideShare, adding some bullet points for the key talking points (I know, bullet points suck – but otherwise all you have are pictures). Hope you enjoy!

Maybe it’s all the time I spend with startups, but while I strongly value Scrum’s ideas behind self-organizing teams & continual feedback – I can’t help but feel Kanban represents the next level of agility, giving us more flexibility and capitalizing on the lessons we’ve learned from Lean.

Scrum

A lot of people tend to think Agile means Scrum – you know how it goes:

Is Agile the same as Lean? When people say “agile” do they really mean Scrum? Or do people still use different types of agile – and if so, why? 

Been getting a lot of questions lately, so thought I’d take a stab at this…

Lean

Lean comes from Lean Manufacturing and is a set of principles for achieving quality, speed & customer alignment (same as what we’re trying to do with agile development, right?).

Mary & Tom Poppendieck adapted the principles from Lean Manufacturing to fit software development and I believe these ideas actually provide the premises behind why agile works:

Read More…..

I’m not a fan of New Year’s Resolutions. I believe that every day gives us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and so it’s silly to put so much stock into that one day each year. Nonetheless, with the new year starting this weekend, I find myself longing to create more and – in the words of Seth Godin – to ship it. The more it terrifies me, the better!

And so, for those of you thinking similar thoughts, here’s a bit of inspiration that others have shipped to help us out:

Productivity Tie-Breaker: How Will You Feel Afterwards? by Mark McGuinness. Includes three things we can do to make sure 2012 is our most creative & productive year yet.

6 Steps to Building Your Creative Endurance by Jarie Bolander. Helping us get back into creative shape.

#YearInReview What did you ship in 2010? by Seth Godin. Seth Godin’s awesome post from last New Years that reminds us it’s not just about what we create but about what we actually ship.

What are YOU going to ship in 2012?

Photo Credit: Ship in a bottle by JohnLH