Category: Agile & Lean Life
Welcome to The Agile & Lean Life category. This category is a collection of all blog posts about applying advanced startup management and software development techniques in personal life to improve personal productivity and odds of success.
Why is that important? There is no harder challenge in business than to build a new disruptive high-tech startup. Building a new startup doesn’t only take courage, innovative ideas and attracting a lot of funding, but also a systematic scientific approach to finding the right product – the market fit.
Managing personal life and becoming successful is also not a piece of cake. Many techniques, approaches and lessons from the lean startup and agile development can be applied to personal life. They can help you achieve a completely new level of personal performance, productivity and success.
Sounds interesting? Before browsing the articles posted under this category, I suggest you read the main idea of how you can benefit from the transference of advanced business knowledge to personal life management.
Blog posts under this category are organized by date published. As a better alternative, you can check out the AgileLeanLife Productivity framework track, where blog posts are arranged in a more logical and systematic sequence, so you can acquire knowledge and concepts for applying lean and agile methodologies into your personal life in a more step-by-step way.
Besides that, the AgileLeanLife productivity track also offers a collection of other productivity tips and tricks, outside the scope of agile and lean life.
Knowledge is not power. Applying knowledge is power. Learning is useless. Validated learning is everything. If there is a single skill you have to learn to be massively successful in the 21st century, it’s validated learning. It’s the only way to build a superior life strategy. The concept of validated learning comes from the lean startup. The validated learning loop helps quickly validate or reject core business hypotheses. Instead of blindly trusting your business idea, you build a minimum viable product and then use a special set of metrics to validate the effect. You build a feature, you measure the results and so you learn what to do next – persevere or pivot. The same process of learning can be extremely useful in personal life. I use it all the time, to learn extremely fast in general and to get insights into what works for me and what doesn’t.
Experimenting is fun by itself and you can enjoy many benefits doing it, but it’s also demanding and expensive. It takes a toll on your emotions, because you usually have to face a series of small failures in the beginning and you often need to invest at least some money into performing an experiment; besides time, energy and creativity, which are always needed. With rapid prototyping in personal life, you want to get to the minimum viable experience as quickly as possible using the fewest resources. Experimenting and rapid prototyping thus go hand in hand. In this article you will learn how to build awesome prototypes.
When you hear the word experiment, you probably think of a crazy scientist sitting in his laboratory and mixing some kind of chemical compounds. There also must be an explosion, I guess. While experiments are most often linked to science, they are very useful in many other disciplines, from arts to business and sports. By following the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, experiments should also become a very important tool in your personal life. The purpose of performing an experiment in science is very simple. You want to either see if something (an idea) works as planned and desired in a very
Much like I am innovating with applying agile and lean techniques in general to personal life, Tim Clark innovated how to use the Business Model Canvas for planing a complex career decisions and maximizing your personal value creation. He came up with a brilliant idea for a canvas named Business Model You. The canvas already helped thousands of people to clarify what they want out of their career. The idea of Business Model You is to help you with complex thinking when you want to make changes in your career. It helps you reinvent your career path by finding the best way for you as an individual to support yourself financially based on your talents, goals, needs, desires and environment.
If you want to avoid being on reactive autopilot, you have to do regular reflections. The main goal of regular reflections is to ask yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding – yourself and your actions, your environment and its paradigms, and the main patterns of your key relationships. With regular reflections, you want to gain as many important insights as possible that can help you shape a superior life strategy, progress towards your goals faster and, in the end, live a better life. The good life. But that’s not all. One of the biggest values of reflection is that you can change how you see yourself, how you feel about certain situations and, in the end, how you act. New thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions. That way, regular reflections really help you stay lean, agile, flexible, happy and …
