Agile
A set of values and principles for software development that prioritizes individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change. Agile emphasizes iterative delivery and continuous feedback over rigid planning.
Agile is not a specific process but a mindset captured in the Agile Manifesto's four values and twelve principles. It emerged as a response to heavyweight waterfall methodologies that assumed requirements could be fully specified upfront. Agile recognizes that software development is inherently uncertain and that the best results come from short feedback loops, close collaboration with users, and the ability to adapt as understanding grows.
AI product development is perhaps the strongest case for agile practices because outcomes are inherently unpredictable. You cannot specify the exact performance of a machine learning model in advance any more than you can specify exactly how users will respond to a new feature. Agile's emphasis on working software, frequent delivery, and responding to change maps directly to the iterative nature of model development, prompt engineering, and growth experimentation. Teams that combine agile delivery with disciplined experiment design create a powerful engine for discovering what works and scaling it quickly.
Related Terms
Product-Market Fit
The degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand. Achieving product-market fit means customers are actively seeking, using, and recommending your product because it solves a real and pressing problem for them.
Jobs to Be Done
A framework that defines customer needs as functional, emotional, and social jobs people hire products to accomplish. It shifts focus from demographic segments to the underlying progress customers are trying to make in specific circumstances.
Minimum Viable Product
The simplest version of a product that can be released to test a core hypothesis with real users. An MVP delivers just enough functionality to gather validated learning while minimizing development time and cost.
Minimum Lovable Product
An evolution of the MVP concept that emphasizes delivering enough quality and delight that early users genuinely love the product. It balances speed-to-market with the emotional engagement needed to drive organic word-of-mouth growth.
Design Sprint
A five-day structured process for rapidly prototyping and testing ideas with real users. Developed at Google Ventures, it compresses months of debate into a focused week of mapping, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and testing.
Lean Startup
A methodology for developing businesses and products through validated learning, rapid experimentation, and iterative releases. It emphasizes reducing waste by testing assumptions before building fully-featured solutions.