A group of software developers created the Agile Manifesto in February 2001 in response to the poor state of software development. At the time, the group focused on building software better, so the Manifesto doesn’t cover how to know if the software you’re building is the right software.

Look who was there:

“Representatives from Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes convened.”

Not a lot of representation from product strategy, customer experience, product design, or other fields we now associate with digital product development.

Some two decades later, the Agile Manifesto has transformed how software comes to life. The Agile Development industry is worth billions, and frameworks dominate any company that produces software as a product, service, or site. The Agile frameworks boast millions of users and thousands of detractors.

The best software development companies, no doubt building on Manifesto’s tenets, have evolved. For instance, the FAANG companies crank out hundreds of deployments a day, run experiments in production, and stay ahead of their clients.

The success “good” software companies enjoy today stems from much more than software development. In today’s enterprises, the purview of “software development” expands to “product development” and involves strategy and design at a foundational level. The focus shifts from “build the thing right” to “build the right thing, then build the thing right.”

This begs the question: Does the Agile Manifesto need to change? Does modern product development require expanding the Manifesto’s scope?

At Method, we work with companies to improve their product development capabilities and create more value for their businesses. One of our core concepts is “Modern Product” development, a set of principles and best practices around building digital products.

Let’s run a quick thought experiment to answer that question. How do the principles of Modern Product fit within the Agile Manifesto’s constructs?

Empowerment, Teams, and Collaboration — Oh, My!

The Agile Manifesto emphasizes “individuals and interactions over processes and tools,” which aligns with Modern Product’s focus on durable, cross-functional teams.

A Modern Product team needs the right people “in the room” to have the proper interactions to do the work. If your teams have many dependencies, they’ll have many bottlenecks. Domain-Driven Design, Conway’s Law, and Team Topologies are frameworks that create team structure, minimize dependencies, and maximize productivity.

Modern Product also highlights team empowerment as a key principle, which enables “responding to change over following a plan.” Teams need a goal or “North Star,” but they also need permission to meet that goal the best way they know how. You’ll struggle to create value if your delivery teams are order takers, just coding features without understanding the problem or its impact.

Modern Product teams handle end-to-end discovery, delivery, and maintenance. “You build it, you run it” might be better stated (yet not as catchy) as “you discover it, you design it, you build it, you run it, you learn it, you improve it.”

As teams build, they learn. Focusing on learning velocity over feature velocity as a team has merit, allowing the team to adapt the software and meet the users/business where it is, not where someone thought it would be when they made the plan.

The Customer Is Always Sometimes Right

Another critical tenet of Modern Product, and the most difficult to implement, is continuous and direct customer input that fuels experiments and validated learning. In Agile Manifesto-ese, this aligns with “customer collaboration over contract negotiation.”

Modern products attack product risk as early in the lifecycle as possible, utilizing design thinking, prototyping, user testing, and (of course) Agile development. It’s much less expensive to user-test a wireframe or Figma design than to build that software, test it, deploy it, analyze it, and then change it.

Instead of creating a contract or backlog full of unproven features, work regularly with users in the cheapest manner possible. The eventual usability, desirability, and feasibility will arrive sooner and be more valuable. The Agile tenet is correct, but the scope of “customer interaction” has grown with our experience, tools, and capabilities.

You Can’t Argue With Results

At Method, we value outcomes over outputs.

This sentiment comes directly from the principles of Modern Product while also aligning with the Manifesto’s note of “working software over comprehensive documentation.” The definition of “working software” here is software that helps users get the value they want. In other words, working software gives users the outcomes they seek.

While it may seem like semantics, shifting a team’s focus from a list of features to a set of outcomes to enable is transformational. Now, the team solves problems and creates value for users instead of building features for a product they don’t see or understand.

While the initial definition of “working software” was likely closer to “software that doesn’t break all the time,” it too has expanded to include user and business outcomes.

This Is My “Not Surprised” Face

Unsurprisingly, the best way to build digital products today aligns with the wisdom of some of the best software practitioners.

Modern Product and Agile Development have the same goal: using software to create value for users and businesses in the best way possible. As expected, a couple decades of experience and innovation have added to the Agile Manifesto’s tenets. Applying Modern Product principles to the Agile Manifesto to adapt it to today’s needs makes it agile in both name and practice.

At Method, we bring Modern Product practices and capabilities to our clients based on experience as old as the Manifesto itself. If you want to know where your teams stand with these principles and how to improve your product development tangibly, we can help.

Work with us to understand your current state and forge the best path to becoming a successful Modern Product company.