How Startups Are Reimagining Agile

Startups are being put to the test in today’s stagnant global economy. As they look to stay lean and still deliver results, these companies are reassessing and refining how they use agile. We discuss this with:

• Terralynn Forsyth, co-founder and chief product officer, FutureFit AI, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Forsyth walks us through her company’s agile journey and how ways of working have evolved. Plus, how she incorporates AI—and how it could change her team’s agile use in the future.
• Tatiana Cziomer, COO, Etaily, Manila, Philippines: Cziomer shares why agile helps startups be more flexible and efficient, how teams at Etaily are using agile to quickly adapt to change, and her advice for project professionals interested in joining the startup space.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
In a time of global economic stagnation, startups are being put to the test. These famously innovative companies—and their commitment to staying lean and iterative—are being challenged to tweak their ways of working to deliver value. How? That’s ahead.

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified^®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Startups are feeling the squeeze. Global venture funding in 2023 reached a five-year low, according to Crunchbase data, down 38% from the year prior. That means startups are looking for new ways to ensure their projects deliver results in a turbulent and hypercompetitive market. One way they can do that? Refining and reimagining their use of agile, transforming project delivery to meet changing consumer needs and expectations. PMI has plenty of resources on agile. Visit PMI.org/podcast and click the transcript for this episode to check them out.

We spoke with two project leaders who discussed the agile journey of their teams, including how they earned buy-in and how their process has evolved. First is Terralynn Forsyth, a co-founder and the chief product officer for FutureFit AI in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her company created an AI tool that helps workers map out an optimized career path.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Terralynn, thanks for joining us. I want to start with this question: Why agile? Tell me why agile is a good match for your startup.

TERRALYNN FORSYTH 
How I like to ground my thinking in agile is, it’s a set of frameworks, tools and structured approaches for dealing with uncertainty. And so that uncertainty element, having access to information in various shapes and forms, it takes different shapes and forms as you build out a technology product.

You are literally starting from nothing. It’s a blank slate. And then as you develop as a company, you’re given different parameters. You’re given different types of information. Your level of certainty is growing. But there’s always an additional amount of uncertainty because of how quickly you can build and iterate because software is so much more modular than, let’s say, a different kind of project. My dad’s a mechanical engineer. He works on big pipe mines, and he’s a pipe specialist. The components that he works in take months and months of feasibility studies before they ever go to build. Their way of operating is going to look very, very different than a software product because software is so modular. But I do think that the core of going in with an element of addressing uncertainty from the beginning of a project to say, “Look, this is what we know, and this is what we don’t. How can we maintain and respond in an agile way throughout the life cycle of a project?” is still going be important regardless of the domain that you’re operating in.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Let’s talk about your agile journey at FutureFit AI. You’ve cycled through a few different approaches as the company has matured. 

TERRALYNN FORSYTH 
Before I jumped into any of this, I was someone who was completely untrained and didn’t know what I was doing, so the evolution of our journey was really that: an evolution over about three to four years to where we are today. We are a technology company, and so going from zero to one was our first phase. So you’re going from blank slate project management to like starts and stops product management. That process for us and the tooling that we probably used very early in that day: lots of spreadsheets, lots of color-coding things, coming together as a team at least once a week between really the sales side, the product side and then the engineering side between three to five people.

I would say the step up from that phase to kind of first product—actually formalizing what we knew that we were building, but still having a level of ambiguity and questions unanswered, but starting to feel that we were generating momentum in the solution that we were building—that was when we started to formalize things like are we doing Kanban? Are we doing scrum? Like how do we want to run our product development process? And that’s really where you start building a muscle around formalizing how you’re working. And then the steps beyond that where you might do a redesign or rebuild and you’re really looking at scaling and expanding, formalization really becomes very important.

I think the irony of agile in general is that people start to become very rigid with how they implement it and aren’t actually asking themselves the question like, “What problem do we actually need to solve for us at this stage?” And that answer is going to take different forms and shapes over time. The formalization of our maturity really came about when we did a comprehensive rebuild, but we did it in a very quick amount of time where agile was crucial to our success. And the formalization of our process and making sure everyone was operating it on the same page and organized became just much more important than it had been in the past.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
It sounds like you figured out what did and didn’t work. You had a version of the product that you were confident in, enough that you can imagine a few sprints out instead of just “Who knows what we’ll be building two weeks from now?” How did that further change your teams’ use of agile approaches?

TERRALYNN FORSYTH 
During a rebuild, there was a foundation and a core product experience. We knew that we just wanted to build better infrastructure around [them]. It was really about addressing the underlying technical architecture so that we were built to scale. But then also, at the same time, you have a company now of 20 different people. There [are] lots of things that we’ve learned along the way. We have new information that we can also put into how we design the experience, the esthetics of the experience, and where we really double down on our value differentiators. I think before, we were much more like Kanban-heavy, just like this is what’s in progress. This transition to a rebuild said, “Well, there [are] some things that we know, so there is some structure that we can put in place. And there’s a level of predictability that we actually need to give the business now because we have real customers’ contractual commitments that we have to deliver on.”

The company and the process that we run now is like a hybrid I would say of scrum and Kanban. There is a reliable cycle that people can depend on with reliable outputs about a quarter at a time. But then there’s also a level of needing to be agile, adapting to feedback that comes in real time, and we have to adapt to that. So maintaining some level of flexibility still is very important to us.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
So product maturity was one part of formalizing agile practices. Were there any other factors that helped define your process? 

TERRALYNN FORSYTH 
I think when we started hiring for more experienced and senior engineers, they started asking questions like, “What’s our product development process? What do we use?” That’s when questions started being raised, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, okay, that sounds like something we should look at.”

Also, for a company that is working B2B like we do, when you start onboarding your first set of customers and actually getting closer to their teams and how they operate, there are actually some really interesting opportunities for us to learn how other, more mature companies operated. So it’s usually two teams coming together to launch a deployment of our product to their users. Watching and learning from how customer teams were operating, obviously at a much higher level, much more sophisticated, but we were able to actually observe and see how their teams were running as well and learn from them.

Learning how to tailor agile for each project

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
What about any pain points in your agile journey? Could you share an example?

TERRALYNN FORSYTH 
The pain point that we had, and we’ve had probably in different shapes and sizes over the years, is reading up on the lean startup and product development books and everything being like “Break things, move fast”— just like speed is most important—to the reality of “Hey, our context actually is quite different than the context in which a lot of these frameworks and best practices and Medium articles and blogs are actually written.” So I think for us, blended approaches to maintain a balance of factors has been really important. And I do think that that is underrepresented when you tend to go to content online and try to learn about some of this stuff.

Actually practicing the judgment and coming back to a core set of questions around “Does this really fit our use case and what we’re trying to solve? Is this actually the best approach for us at this time?” I think a lot of the pain points too were self-imposed as well, trying to create the perfect process and then it’s one and done. Process is actually something that evolves over time and will take different shapes and sizes over time, and there’s no really right or wrong answer. It’s just like fine-tuning your own judgment of what is best for your team.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
So what does that look like? Based on what you just said, [is there] anything you’ve done to your week-to-week process to build in some of those, “Does this make sense?” moments? How do you make sure that gets worked in?

TERRALYNN FORSYTH 
Regardless of the approach that you take, stepping back from the day-to-day work and implementing some type of retro[spective] with the team to hear, like “How is the process working for your team?” You need some kind of regular qualitative feedback from your team on how the process is working for them. Because you could be a group of project managers or specialists in your own silo and think that it’s working great from all external metrics—everything’s on track, everything’s green up here—but how the team is actually operating or there’s some underlying factor where they’re not enabled to do their best work can still get left kind of unrepresented.

And then on the other side, pairing that with quantitative data of how are you actually measuring success and making sure that’s always in place, and pairing both qualitative and quantitative measures and making sure that “The project might be on the right timeline, but if it’s a really large project, are we reevaluating its value if we’ve learned new information or if things have changed?” So just because the metrics that we had at the start are the metrics we aligned on, making sure that we’re reassessing them as the project takes shape. Those are some of the specific examples that come to mind.

Incorporating AI into agile

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
Even as you’ve honed how to best use agile in your projects, you’re still experimenting and adding new layers. Tell me how you’re incorporating AI into your agile practices.

TERRALYNN FORSYTH 
Being an AI company from day one, AI looked very different for us back then than some of the newer forms of generative AI that are coming out now. So I would say it’s not always been core to our process. Specifically, generative AI is like a consumer tool at your fingertips that opens up a lot of the newer capabilities that I’m excited about. I’m excited about it thinking about it basically in two ways for project management or more generalized occupations that really sit in the middle of various groups. There’s a wide application and then a deep application.

So AI really opens up the door and broadens the scope, enabling more comprehensive management [and] enabling people to do more with less. And then it allows them to go deeper in areas where they might have not been able to go in before. So for someone like me who works very closely with engineers and data teams, I’m not going to know everything that they know in order to write requirements sometimes, but I’m the requirements writer. There’s processes of discovery and scoping and actually writing out tickets. I can get those tickets to a much higher level of sophistication now by using generative AI to go deeper in domains that I’m just not familiar with in order to speak the other person’s language, essentially.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
How do you see AI changing your teams’ use of agile? And how do you think that might look different in the months ahead, given how fast AI is evolving? 

TERRALYNN FORSYTH 
Right now, a lot of us are using a ChatGPT or a more generalized tool adapted to a product context. So we’re having to feed the system that we’re using a lot of contextual information. There are tools now coming out that are more specialized to product development. But I would anticipate that probably within the next year, specialized AI capabilities within the systems that you’re using. And probably over the next year, I would anticipate also whoever your employer is, whether it is a large company or a startup, having expectations of you using it. So right now, I think it’s a nice-to-have skill set. It’s like, “I can do this thing faster or easier,” or whatever else. I would expect over the next year, the expectations of that skill set and ability to change and the tools that right now [are] more general and it’s kind of like you’re hacking a few things maybe together. The specialized, more niche solutions that are more adapted to the workflow of a project manager are probably going to become more of the norm versus the general capabilities. The general capabilities, of course, will stay, but right now, I think it’s the specialized solutions that are currently in development. They’re a little bit fewer and far between.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Are you enjoying this episode? Please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your feedback helps us keep making this show. Now, let’s go to our next conversation.

One reason that agile is a good match for startups is that these companies often build and release products and then iterate quickly based on customer feedback. Tatiana Cziomer is the COO at Etaily in Manila, Philippines. The startup works with businesses on their e-commerce journeys, offering tech, operations, brand and data services. Tatiana spoke with Projectified’s Hannah LaBelle about how staying iterative has helped the company optimize its customer experience.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

HANNAH LABELLE 
Tatiana, let’s start by talking about your startup experience. Tell me about your role at Etaily and your time at the startup so far.

TATIANA CZIOMER 
I joined Etaily during the pandemic. I decided to take the leap of faith and join a startup e-commerce enabler in Southeast Asia. It has definitely been challenging but also rewarding since I was part of the team that established and scaled our operations and tech teams.

An e-commerce enabler provides end-to-end services for brands, particularly for their e-commerce channel. If you’re a new brand to the e-commerce space, we can build your websites. We can open online channels for you on the marketplaces, such as Lazada and Shopee in Southeast Asia. We also manage your business online. And then the last part is really scaling your business. So we have internal tools, especially around data and analytics, which help us gain data and derive insights and actions to help scale the business further on the online channels.

Why agile and startups are a great match

HANNAH LABELLE 
Before we dive further into Etaily, I want to discuss the startup environment in relation to project management. Why is the startup space more open to agile, and what are the biggest benefits when it comes to using agile in this environment? 

TATIANA CZIOMER 
There’s pressure to deliver products or solutions that achieve certain business outcomes. And due to limited or finite resources, such as funding, we really have to deliver them quickly. Whether it’s an internal tool to help the business become more efficient, productive or enable scaling better to external tools where we’re still trying to find product market fit, we need to be able to pivot quickly, depending on the testing that we’re seeing, the end user feedback and other requirements.

So for startups, the faster you deploy, the quicker you’re able to reap the benefits of these processes and solutions. In Etaily, we work basically in two-week sprints. So the idea is this sprint, we deploy a solution which helps us streamline a process. Maybe during that first iteration, it will save us 10 hours of effort. But in the following sprint, we would deploy additional changes to further increase the time or cost savings that we can reap out of those functionalities.

The biggest benefit is really in the flexibility and adaptability. So when we deploy our new solutions, we’re able to gather feedback, learn and see if these solutions really meet user expectations or meet market requirements. If they don’t meet the expectations, we can also quickly pivot, learn more from the testing that we’re doing, and deploy again potentially a totally new solution or an iteration of the existing solution.

HANNAH LABELLE 
You’ve mentioned that your teams are using sprints. How are the teams using agile, and how has that changed given the marketplace and where the marketplace is at?

TATIANA CZIOMER 
We use agile approach primarily within the tech environment. For the other teams, we tend to still use more of the waterfall or predictive models. We’ve seen, at least for the tech teams, that this approach helps us deal with marketplace pressures. We’re able to quickly pivot and reprioritize our product backlog in order to accommodate these changes, especially if these changes have [an] impact on the technology that we use for us internally and for our clients.

HANNAH LABELLE 
And what’s an example of like a change in, say, the e-commerce space in general that you would be looking to adapt to?

TATIANA CZIOMER 
One of those changes is, if you’re quite familiar with how mega-campaigns are run in Southeast Asia, like your 9.9s, your 11.11s and 12.12s. So in Southeast Asia, 9.9 is basically your September 9. We call it the first mega-campaign of your quarter three of the year. And that really sets the pace for the online retail season. Then the next biggest one, which is typically the biggest of the year, is the 11.11; 11.11 happens on November 11. And then specific to the Philippines, where we have a big holiday shopping, gifting tradition, there’s the 12.12, which happens on December 12.

The marketplaces typically want your product image to have certain badges or themes that coincide with the theme of the campaign. That puts a lot of pressure on enablers like us to churn out these creatives and upload them into the different marketplaces. So internally, we’ve developed an in-house tool that allows us to schedule the publication of these images. During the 9.9 campaign last year, for example, we used the MVP, or the minimum viable product of the solution, and it took us five seconds to upload the image versus if we were doing it manually, it typically takes longer than five seconds.

HANNAH LABELLE 
So how did using an agile approach for that project help deliver a successful outcome?

TATIANA CZIOMER 
Like I mentioned, it took us five seconds to upload the image, and maybe only a 30% success rate on the first upload. Of course, we received complaints from stakeholders that this is such a low success rate. The system was too slow. But I told the team that it was better than [a] 0% success rate and better than doing things manually, where a person will have to be up until midnight to manually upload all those images.

We did a thorough postmortem. We gathered learnings. Then used several sprints to provide incremental improvements. So by 11.11 of last year, we were already able to shorten the time to upload to three seconds. By 12.12, it was down to two seconds, and [the] success rate has also improved during that process. So this particular functionality really showed that we’re able to improve a particular solution quickly by deploying quickly, learning from our experience and production, continuously improving on the functionalities until we get better and better results.

HANNAH LABELLE 
So, as you’ve said, your tech team is really the one [that’s] using agile approaches the most. Did you have to build any buy-in across other units or teams, or with executive leaders, when it comes to using this approach for those tech-specific projects?

TATIANA CZIOMER 
I would not necessarily say it was getting buy-in from other teams or executive leaders. Fortunately for us, the other teams and their leaders were supportive of the agile approach since they understood this was the best way forward to deliver value quickly. For us, it was more of aligning on actual ways of working. We had to align on how we facilitate cross-functional collaboration between the tech teams and the business and functional teams. Example, how do we get requirements from the business? How do we provide transparency on how we would prioritize requests from multiple teams, given our limited tech capacity? How will [the] tech team manage stakeholders’ expectations, when they will get their requests delivered or deployed in [the] production environment? So our IT service delivery team really did a great job of establishing, cascading and educating the entire organization, and continuously improving these agile processes that we follow.

Improving agile to align ways of working across teams

HANNAH LABELLE 
Did you take any steps to really accelerate agile adoption across these workflows? And how did you improve your team’s use of agile approaches to maximize the value that could be delivered?

TATIANA CZIOMER 
Driving agile adoption for us was relatively easy, since a lot of the people, especially those in the tech teams, were already using the approach. What we struggled [with] a bit was improving our team’s use of agile to maximize the value delivered. During the early days of the company, we were doing two-week sprints, but we were barely deploying any new functionality in our production environment. So one of the things we did was to empower the teams to self-organize and decide which specific agile approach they want to use for their team. Some teams decided for the scrum, while other teams opted for the Kanban approach. One team even went for the hybrid “scrumban” approach, which combines the best elements of scrum and Kanban. So as long as they’re able to organize and prioritize their user stories properly, then it was okay for me.

Second, we always emphasize the need for continuous improvement. We always do a postmortem at the end of our two-week sprint to discuss highlights and lowlights for the sprint and identify areas for improvement. We’re always trying to push our sprint velocity while maintaining a high level of sprint quality. We also try to measure the business benefit or business outcome brought about by the user stories we deployed in the live environment.

HANNAH LABELLE 
You spent several years at some bigger organizations like HP and Lazada. How did your experience as a project manager in these environments help you to lead teams and projects at a startup?

TATIANA CZIOMER 
I was able to leverage the things that I’ve learned from a more structured setup into the startup. Of course, I also had to understand the context and learn the ropes of startup—learning which things from the corporate or more established setup that I can apply, versus things that are not yet applicable in a startup. So coming from a project management perspective, I was already very process-oriented. So I know, even though it’s a startup space, I need to bring some structure in this chaotic environment. So that was one of my first goals when I started establishing the operations and the tech teams in Etaily: trying to find what level of processes we can implement where you’re still able to deliver value quickly, but at the same time, ensure that we have more consistency, more rigor in doing things. For me, it was also a learning experience, finding that right balance between having too much processes off the bat versus not having enough processes. It was difficult at first, but when I was able to find that right balance, then we were able to execute. “Okay, this is the level of process oriented-ness, or data driven-ness, that we want to maintain in Etaily.”

HANNAH LABELLE 
What’s your top piece of advice to project professionals who are interested in working at a startup?

TATIANA CZIOMER 
I actually prepared three, if that’s okay.

HANNAH LABELLE 
Perfect! We’ll do three. Let’s do it.

TATIANA CZIOMER 
In the startup world, you try to break barriers or boundaries. You try to do something [that’s] never [been] done before. So there is no playbook to follow. You really need to carve out your own path using these three values. 

One, for me, is being data-driven and highly analytical. There’s a massive amount of data out there. You need to be able to draw insights and actions while being cognizant of certain biases that can occur during your analysis. Example would be survivorship bias, where you tend to use data that pass certain criterias. Example, you would only analyze products or solutions that succeeded in the market, while overlooking data from failed solutions. So being able to analyze holistically a set of data and draw appropriate conclusions from that will help you in the startup environment.

Second is [being] willing to learn new things. Most startups will have a very lean team. Like myself—I am the operations and the technology person in our company. So people will normally have to double hat or even triple hat. You could also be hired as, for example, a product manager, but at some point you will need to also become a project manager or a service delivery manager or an incident manager, handling everything revolving around the solutions you’ve developed. You need to be able to go out of your comfort zone and learn how to do things which are not necessarily your strength or core competency yet. 

And lastly, for me, is being able to cope with a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environment, or a VUCA environment. There are a lot of things which will not be in your control. Market conditions or customer requirements can quickly change. So for me, you just need to be able to focus on the things you can control, and then just adapt the things that you cannot control in this environment.

HANNAH LABELLE 
Fantastic. Tatiana, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been great.

TATIANA CZIOMER
All right. Thank you so much, Hannah.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 
And thank you for listening to Projectified. Like what you heard? Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a rating or review. Your feedback matters a lot—it helps us get the support we need to continue making this show. And be sure to visit us online at PMI.org/podcast, where you’ll find the full transcripts for episodes as well as links to related content like useful tools and templates, the latest research reports, and more. Catch you next time!