The market for startups is growing drastically, so is its failure rate. In research, nine out of every ten startups are shut down due to multiple reasons. These rising entrepreneurs either fail in creating a space for their product in the market or die with premature scaling. The fundamental difference you will find in a startup and an established corporate is its “Structure.” Every component in a corporate is highly organized, and people are aware of their role, whereas a startup fails to maintain an efficient working environment, which eventually creates chaos.

This is where Agile comes to the rescue.

The Agile methodology helps you break down each component of your project and speed up the process without compromising the quality. According to stats, using an Agile project development approach has been adopted by over 70% of organizations, including startups, and it has shown a 28% higher success rate than the traditional system.

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Why Do Most Startups Fail?

To answer this question appropriately, we shall refer to research conducted by CBI Insights, where they asked 101 entrepreneurs why they had to shut down their business. These are five significant reasons which came out:

• Inconsistent Market: 42% of founders agreed to this as a core reason for their shutdown. They presented services or a product that was not needed in the market. This can also be because of over saturation and very high competition, which became difficult to overcome.
• Lack of Fluidity: Every business runs with a perfect balance of tangible and intangible assets. Money is the most liquid asset that enterprises possess to perform tasks. The research showed that 29% of entrepreneurs could not maintain a cash balance and ran out of money.
• Team Failure: Startups are a business organization that is just learning to enter a vast market that is highly competitive and filled with experienced competitors. It becomes difficult for people who do not have the right management skill set to handle such an extended team.
• Successful Competitors: With 18% of votes, the founders felt monopolistic competitors were a significant reason for their startup’s failure. Sometimes, the market has big competitors that have been in this business for years and have built a strong brand image in the consumer’s mind. It becomes challenging for newly launched enterprises to take over such fame.
• Cost Problems: Many entrepreneurs quoted that they have not well calculated their costing. The pricing structure should balance your internal cost and the profit margin. Furthermore, it is crucial to keep the price competitive to achieve higher customer interaction.

What is Agile Methodology?

Agile is essentially a project management approach that includes practices and principles useful during each project life cycle. The shorter development-oriented cycles are known as sprints; the developers focus on improving the service or product during these manufacturing periods. Not to mention, a well-oiled team of developers works on the projects altogether. Indeed, Agile solutions depend highly on teamwork and collaboration for a project life cycle to have an efficient outcome.

Prior to agile, companies used the waterfall model, which constitutes multiple steps like Requirement, Design, Implementation, Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance. To build software, a company must first cater to the market’s needs and look for the apt requirement. Further, the developers have to go through the following steps to create an actual product. The entire process seems lengthy and time-consuming, which is not feasible in this highly competitive era.

This led to the demand for an optimized approach that could multiply the efficiency and remove all extra time-consuming blocks. So, finally, in 2000, Jeff Sutherland and his 16 software developers came up with Agile. The following approach removed the waterfall method and established a more straightforward product development module. We can divide the project into multiple components, aiming to finish each module and gathering customer reviews for any further changes. This method is quite optimistic about being used in all startups to achieve an efficient workflow.

The Agile Manifesto has quoted four values and 12 principles to get the expected results. These are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools — The customers prefer human interaction more than the one involving multiple methods and online tools.
• Working software over Comprehensive documentation — The Agile Manifesto scraps off long approval delays in replacement with providing a working software. The changes can be done quickly according to customer reviews.
• Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation — Before this, the clients used to pre-define what they wanted from a software way before starting its development process. Both the parties negotiate and come to a final product, making the client feel left out of the entire development process. However, both sides work hand-in-hand in all development stages through Customer collaboration.
• Responding to change over following a plan — The outside world is too dynamic to force your startup to sync with your pre-set plan. However, planning is essential, but you shouldn’t be entirely dependent on it. You don’t need to follow a specific business roadmap and must evolve as per the changes happening in your industry.

Note: Both the items used for comparison contain values. The manifesto only suggests which one has a higher value after researching the current marketing trends.

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These are the four pillars of an efficient, agile structure which business needs to adopt and scrape off all traditional methods.

Benefits of Agile For Fast-Growing Start-ups

Increased Productivity

The Agile framework aims to break down large, complicated tasks into smaller segments to initiate a continuous product launch. Before this, the traditional method was long and hectic, which started from finding appropriate product requirements to execution and maintenance. The waterfall method forced people to wait for their turn, which caused a lot of time to the startup. However, the agile framework will overcome this problem and eventually increase productivity.

Induce Changes Effectively

The Agile manifesto included four primary values, one of them quoted as “Working software over comprehensive documentation.” This means that the startup can launch its product in the market and evaluate customer responses for changes. These edits can be simultaneously made along the development process till you reach your ultimate goal.

Improved Transparency

Throughout the development operation, the Agile framework ensures high transparency from developers to stakeholders. Everyone in this chain knows what is happening in the development room and can offer further changes.

Launch Your Product

While following the waterfall method, most of the time is spent developing a suitable product that resists edits. This results in the loss of your investor’s money and time. However, while adopting the Agile method, you can launch the product and analyze further customer reviews. They can bring out the product in the market as soon as they create its MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version.

Effective Communication

The Agile methodology focuses on internal and external communication. Breaking the project into multiple layers demands an effective communication channel between developers. In the same way, you must ensure appropriate information is passed to your stakeholders and consumers.

Avoid Burnout

Another primary goal that the Agile framework truly believes in is to avoid burnout. Traditional methods either leave you unproductive or force you to work 20 hours a day. And, both these methods do no good for the business. Adapting the Agile project management system will ensure a proper channel for work distribution, leaving the team much more productive.

Minimize Wastage

In the initial days, most startups are tight on their budget with a small team, which can handle only a specific number of tasks. These resources need to be efficiently used to provide optimum output with minimum effort. Embedding the Agile framework will push your product earlier in the market with the functionality to make changes. It aims to complete a large project within a specified deadline without pressuring your team members.

Collaborative Efforts

The major advantage of adopting Agile methodology is working together as a big team. Each component in the manufacturing stage comes together by the entire team’s collaborative efforts. Working together makes everyone responsible and aware of the changes and upgradation happening to the product.

Competitive Advantage

When the startup launches a product in the market and promotes it through startup PR, they can make effective changes by examining customer’s reviews. These updates can be included in each sprint, which eventually helps to build a product that outmatches the competitors. Continuous customer feedback plays a significant role in developing an efficient and high-quality product.

Reduced Risk

Startups work on limited resources with very high risk. They cannot afford to scrape down the entire product framework in case of any changes. They can adapt the Agile project management system to quickly embed edits after analyzing customer reviews. This helps in reducing unnecessary risk and ultimately launch a high-end completive product.

Challenges while adopting Agile Methodology

As fun as the entire process of integrating the Agile Project approach might seem, it also comes with some extraordinary challenges that your startup might have to go through while its implementation.

• Agile is Not a Remedy: If you think implementing the Agile approach will instantly place everything together, then this might be a problem. Agile is a method that you can adapt to smooth the functioning of your business; it will not help you fix your internal issues.
• Resistance To Evolve: Agile is a new concept that people working in your startup might not be aware of. Every human is conscious while adapting a new methodology at the start. So, as the owner, you need to make sure that people are informed and comfortable accepting Agile.
• Lack of Proper Evaluation: As discussed above, Startups lack a streamlined body to evaluate their work. The Agile methodology is about serving defined components at different levels and grasping customer reviews. An unstructured evaluation channel will not allow the team to reflect, and thus, the startup might collapse.
• Expert Guidance Requires: Integrating the Agile project management approach might seem simple to adapt but require expert guidance to achieve optimum results. This leads to additional fund requirements, making it difficult for startups to spend.
• Excessive Freedom For Change: An efficient product manufacturing channel includes quality, time, cost, and scope. A change in any of them will eventually cause a disturbance in the other components. Furthermore, Agile follows a flexible approach where changes can be done in all product manufacturing stages. This unregulated method can lead to loss of both time and money which are essential to keep any startup intact.

Conclusion

Startups are highly vulnerable to risks; they need proper care and an effective management system to offer products within deadlines. The use of agile is increasing tremendously due to the comprehensive approach to simplifying the entire development process. As a startup owner, you need to be open to adapt methods that have shown incredible results and are apt for your business.

About Author

This article is written by Elizabeth Luther. She is a SaaS content writer, helping SaaS brands make more revenue through content marketing. In her free time, she likes to travel and read books.

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