12 Agile Principles, applied to Romantic Relationships

Disclaimer: I am neither an agile nor relationship expert, this is simply a thought experiment, so, read on at your own risk.

My friend Eyitemi Egbejule triggered this post when made a comment on another tweet, suggesting that the OP and his partner set aside some time for daily standups since it appeared like he was trying to build an agile team instead of relationship.

I thought about it for a moment, and while the comment was funny, it seemed to me like it wouldn’t be wide off the mark to apply the 12 agile principles to romantic relationships.

I explored the application of the first three principles of the agile manifesto to romantic relationships in a thread on Twitter which I’ll continue below.

1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

If you treat the relationship as the product and partners as customers and stakeholders, then it’s easy to see how this makes sense in the context of a relationship. To build a successful product, you must continually deliver satisfaction to customers by improving the product as often as possible.

To build a successful relationship, you must improve the quality of your relationship as often as possible.

Simply put, any relationship that does not continually satisfy the partners should simply not exist.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.

In line with the first principle, in which the goal is to ensure your partner is satisfied, you need to be able to accommodate changing requirements in the course of your relationship. Sometimes your partner needs someone to have a discussion with, sometimes they need someone just to listen.

Requirements could change per time, and you need to be able to accommodate changing requirements.

Note: Beware of scope creep as this could eventually lead stakeholder dissatisfaction as well as customer dissatisfaction.

3. Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months)

This goes without saying — continuous delivery of a working relationship should be your priority, & you must evaluate your relationship as often as possible to see if it’s working or not.

This will help you know when to

1. make changes, however little, that contribute incrementally to the success
2. celebrate wins, however small to keep the fire burning

4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project

Remember that partners are both stakeholders and customers in this product. Therefore partners must corporate and be aligned on the objectives of the relationship as well the plan for achieving those objectives.

Partners must work together as a team to make decisions and take actions that benefit the relationship and clear obstacles that impede the relationship.

5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done.

Happy partners are more likely to be motivated to keep the relationship going, so partners need to find ways to keep each other interested in the relationship. Go on dates, get yourselves gifts, support your partners business or career, stay motivated!

This goes without saying, but you need to have a firm belief in the reliability and ability of your partner to do their best to make the relationship work, you need to trust your partner otherwise your relationship is set up to fail.

You don’t want to be with someone whose actions or inactions you always second-guess, it is not suitable for them, and it is certainly not right for you.

6. Face-to-face conversations are the best form (co-location)

Many agile teams in various companies co-locate, working together from the same room so that issues can be immediately bubbled up and resolved as quickly as possible since all stakeholders are in the conversations can be had immediately.

The agile manifesto encourages Face-to-face interactions over other types of communications, you simply can’t adequately convey all emotions or read body language solely via text. Call yourselves on video, go see your partners as often as possible, live together if you can.

7. Working software is the primary measure of progress

A working software (software that satisfies customers) is the primary measure of a teams’ progress.

A working relationship is the only metric you should measure and optimize for, if the relationship is not working, then there is no progress.

8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace

Incremental development deployed at a fairly predictable and sustainable pace is the hallmark of agile software delivery.

No human is perfect, and no relationship is perfect, in other to have a successful relationship, partners must take incremental and sustained steps towards improving the quality of the relationship.

9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design

Stakeholders in agile teams must pay the right attention to technical excellence, favouring a quick and dirty solution over a well-thought-out solution will lead to technical debt will eventually come back to bite you.

As the saying goes, whatever is worth doing is worth doing well, if you must make changes to yourself or your relationship to make things work, then you must give it your all, half baked decisions of today will eventually resurface when you think you’ve moved on.

10. Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential

Simplicity is doing exactly what works for you at that time, premature scaling is one of the “deadly sins” of many startups; optimizing what needs not to be optimized will cause unforeseen problems for stakeholders.

You don’t need to do what people are doing or move as fast as others are moving, you don’t need to get married before you are both ready, keep it simple and keep improving yourselves and your relationship till you are ready.

11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams

The best solutions always emerge from teams that have autonomy and power to make their own decisions. They also make their decisions faster as they don’t have to deal with process bottlenecks since they can make decisions on their own.

Partners in relationships can learn from this principle and strive to limit third-party interference in their relations as much as possible, let the team be self-organized and self-contained.

12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective and adjusts accordingly

Many agile teams periodically meet to reflect, ask and answer some questions on a particular period — at the end of a sprint in Scrum.

Regular retrospectives allow you to identify areas of self-improvement and process improvements, this can also be done in the context of a relationship.

It doesn’t need to be elaborate, it could be a short discussion where you aim to answer three simple questions;

1. What’s going well?
2. What’s not going well?
3. What should we do better from now on?

Finally, the most crucial unwritten principle of the agile manifesto is “agility” itself, which is the willingness to adopt and adapt to changes and make compromises as often as necessary to ensure customer satisfaction.

In order to keep the relationship going, and partners satisfied, partners need to be willing to make changes and compromises.