labs craft conf 2 - editedEven though there’s a huge amount of material on this topic, software development made right can help organisations immensely.

It’s important to invest in development: not just in engineering but in the whole value generation process, enabling it to adapt quickly to requirements.

We strongly believe that great engineering is not enough. Our goal is to enhance the way we create value for our customers, meaning whole company-level agility is necessary.

 

That’s why we were excited to attend Marty Cagan’s “How to Create Products Customers Love” workshop at CraftConf! During his workshop last week, it was clear Cagan’s top rule was to begin with that same vision and passion.

labs craft conf - edited

Some ideas from his presentation were particularly valuable:

  • ‘Great products come from great product teams’

This means cross-functional, product, design, engineering, all-round teams. Marty highlighted the need to get these minds working together effectively – ‘put[ing] them right next to each other’.

  • ‘In a good product team everyone contributes equally to product discovery’

He wasn’t afraid to say that the single biggest source of innovation, consistently, is not the product manager, it is not even the designer. The biggest source of innovation is typically the engineers, especially when the lead engineer is participating in product discovery. And that’s because they best understand the technology and what’s possible. Marty argued that ‘if you’re using your developers to code, you’re only getting half their value’.

  • ‘In a good product culture you don’t have endless meetings, you don’t have a bunch of escalations; you test!’

Product culture is all about moving fast and constantly learning, while knowing it’s all about validating that learning.

At Ebury, we need to be able to run product tests very quickly following one of the mantras of Google – ‘data beats opinions’.

Thankfully, we’re fortunate to be operating in a fintech company with an Agile culture that recognises the positive process of learning through failure, understanding it as a crucial part of innovation.

 

It was also a pleasure to share some thoughts on Agile product development with the Poppendiecks at CraftConf.

Many agile-ists consider Mary and Tom among the top people working in this field and yet they remain so approachable and accessible. Over the last two years I’ve exchanged many emails with them on large and small issues and so it was an honour to finally meet them in person.

Thanks CraftConf for bringing us together!

labs craft conf 1 - edited

I’ve already invited them to visit our fabulous Tech team in Málaga!

Click here to ‘Meet the devs’

Join the team changing the future of FinTech

Apply now!