Introduction to Agile

There are many (good god, so overwhelmingly many) schools of thought around parenting. You can raise your kid like the French, Jesus, or a dog. You can say no, you can say yes. You can exclusively play, you can reject play altogether. You can pretend sugar doesn't exist until they get their hands on a full cupcake at a neighborhood birthday party and turn on you with the thunderous betrayal of Cersei Lannister. 

You have many, many options, and, ideally, one of them lights you up like a last-row Wordle realization. 

As a Product Operations Manager married to a software engineer, I found some comfort in looking for ways to contextualize the stages of raising of our first kid. We used the language we both speak to bring humor and resilience to the otherwise overwhelming, stressful, and manual process of child-rearing. 

Agile is all about expecting change. It assumes that the forces driving your priorities will change, and that your teams must be ready to adapt. I can find no better description of early parenting: the minute you feel like you've got it, your kid hits a sleep regression or begins cruising or needs to switch daycare centers. Most guides for raising an agile-organized family start when your kids are old enough to participate in retros or Kanban chore boards, but I found it helpful from the jump: when your child feels more like a product than a teammate.

Normalizing that disruption and feeling prepared for it helped me tremendously, and I hope it helps you too.

SECTIONS

1. Series A - collecting resources for your product (getting pregnant)

2. MVP - developing a first version of your product (pregnancy)

3. Beta - initial release (fourth trimester)

4. V2 - initial refinements (toddlerhood)

5. Going Public - expanding stakeholders (school-age)