I’ve been getting introduced to Agile software development lately.  In Agile, you don’t plan out what your product will be after 1 year of development time.  You set some general goals and do some work in a short period (2-4 weeks).  You then check out what you built, make sure you are headed in the right direction, and then go forward with another short period (a sprint).

The core of all this is that you spend a lot of time checking on what you are doing with “stakeholders” – the market, people in the company, partners, other people.  It’s an iterative process – you do something, check it, fix it,  do it, check it, fix it.  It’s a tough process for a lot of “traditional” software developers – they like to sit back, plan the perfect product, and then build it over a long period.  Anyone in a software company knows what happens:

The real problem that I saw in this process is that people want to DECIDE what to do before the ASK people about what they are doing.  This really resonated with me in a sales process.  When we are selling, we are always trying to figure out what we should be doing.  We want to make the right decisions, so we sit in our offices and think.  We might even consult some sales training and chat with a manager.  A lot of this process looks like a software development manager DECIDING what to build.

More and more, we need to go back to the customer (or coach or ally or whatever) and ASK some more questions.  We probably can ask some questions of our tech guy – we could even ask some questions to other salespeople.

We all have a plan in our heads on what we should do.  The sad part is that none of us can really figure it all out – it’s better to be Agile, make small decisions, check with all people involved, and build that tire swing.