Why NDD?
Ever get the impression that something is seriously wrong with how we deliver software today?
Like, for all the amazing new experiences we create WITH software, the experience of HOW we create the software itself is getting worse, not better?
If you're following some variation of Agile methodology, you're probably among the millions of product team members that feel let down by the modern reality of working this way.
- You wanted agility, what you got was more complexity.
- You wanted less management overhead, all you got was more rituals, processes and tickets.
- Worst of all, you trusted that "working software over extensive documentation" was a great premise. But you still ended up with piles of documentation - only now it's fragmented and distributed to the extent that nobody even knows how your software should work anymore.
How can you have “working” software, if you have no shared understanding of what “working” even means?
Agile isn’t working – but it’s not because Agile doesn’t work.
Agile seems to have been slain, and the bloody knife rests in the hands of its apostles - tools like JIRA, frameworks like SAFe, mindless ceremonies, and all the 2-day certifications that gave people permission to kill it by a thousand cuts.
We know how you feel, because we are you.
Like you, we devoted decades of our careers to trying to harness the promise of Agile. But what we found was that adding extra layers of techniques, tools and processes still resulted in a broken team experience, and usually, broken software.
The rotten core of most adaptations of agile is the splintered distribution of information and people.
- You work in a multidisciplinary team of great experts, but you are practically never on the same page, and literally speak different languages.
- The majority of bugs that devour your progress are mistakes of understanding, not mistakes of implementation.
- The idea that you could have a single source of truth for your whole system, understandable by your whole team, feels like a dream you gave up on years ago.
Are you ready to change all that?
The change comes from tearing down complex processes and replacing them with simpler practices built to serve the most important part of a software project:
You.
As a human, you don’t think, converse or understand in snippets.
When requirements are chunked up into fragments, then stored in tools that are designed for work tracking and planning, you lose the thread - that crucial, linear context that our minds are built for.
It’s not good storytelling - you’d never expect that drip feeding someone tickets with partial clues to a puzzle would empower them to understand what is really important.
Since the dawn of human civilization, how people actually relate, understand and communicate is through shared stories.
That's why we've created a new approach called Narrative-Driven Development (NDD) - to burn down the broken systems of the past and build something more simple, more human, and more effective.
Not snippets of stories, but simple, coherent narratives that orientate and align everyone on who is who, what is what, how it all fits together and most importantly WHY.
This is the true foundation of collaboration. Which means it is the natural foundation for product development.
Your new practice of Narrative-Driven Development starts here.