For any product stakeholder, success hinges on two critical elements:
- A Clear Vision
- A Fast Iterating Team (FIT)
A clear vision defines the problem you aim to solve and identifies the ideal customer who faces this problem and a FIT team rapidly learns and adapts to customer feedback, aligning products with market demands. Without these two key ingredients, teams risk building the wrong product, missing the market’s needs, or worse, running out of budget before achieving their goals.
What is a FIT Team?
Fast Iterating Teams (FIT) are software teams structured to deliver high-quality product updates quickly and consistently. They emphasize continuous improvement by regularly refining processes and integrating customer feedback to validate and enhance features. Guided by best practices and high standards, FIT teams aim to solve problems permanently, ensuring efficiency and reducing future work. By using continuous feedback and process refinement, FIT teams ensure rapid and reliable product updates, helping businesses meet market demands efficiently and maintain high standards.
FIT teams are composed of everyone involved in the product development process. Unlike traditional software teams, FIT teams include product decision-makers, designers, developers, and anyone involved in delivering a software product to customers. The core principle behind FIT is to ensure continuous integration of feedback and delivery of improvements throughout the development lifecycle. This approach not only speeds up iterations but also emphasizes identifying what should be done and doing those things correctly.
What Makes a Team FIT?
Fast Iterating Teams adhere to four key practices and deliver software using two essential processes. Integrating these enables a software team to accelerate its development process while continuously adapting to meet its users’ evolving needs.
Four FIT Practices:
- Continuous Delivery: Delivering high-quality product increments quickly and reliably.
- Continuous Improvement: Regularly reflecting on how the product is built and organized and making necessary adjustments to enhance productivity and product quality.
- Validated Learning: Incorporating customer feedback to validate product features and make data-driven decisions.
- Do Things Right: Ensure senior leadership guides the team to adhere to best practices and high standards. Solve problems in a way that makes solving similar problems in the future easier and more efficient.
Two FIT Processes:
- Product Management Process: This process involves refining product ideas into valuable features and delivering a minimum viable version to customers. The feedback collected from customers is then used to iterate and improve the product continuously. This process ensures that the product evolves based on actual user needs and preferences.
- Software Development Process: Kanban? Scrum? Starting with a software process the team agrees on, this process focuses on taking a piece of work from development to production. FIT teams ensure that every change is only complete when it is tested and deployed to production environments, enabling quick feedback and reducing the time between development and customer delivery.
Why a FIT Team is Your Next Step Towards Success
If you are clear on what problem needs to be solved and how to solve it, the next step is making sure the product development team can iterate quickly to deliver a solution to the market. Adopting a FIT team will be transformative for your software development process. FIT teams deliver high-quality product updates quickly and consistently, ensuring that your business can adapt rapidly to market demands.
By integrating continuous feedback and regularly refining processes, FIT teams validate and enhance features based on real user data, leading to products that truly meet customer needs. This approach not only improves efficiency and reduces future work but also maintains high standards through adherence to best practices.
With a FIT team, you can solve problems permanently and sustain product quality, ultimately positioning your business for long-term success. Embrace the FIT practices to stay competitive, responsive, and ready to tackle the challenges of today’s fast-paced digital landscape.
