The Agile and Mobile Revolution with Rob Volk, Founder of Foxbox Digital

In July 2017, Forbes interviewed more than 500 senior executives from around the world, and 92% said they believe organizational agility is critical to business success. If you’re considering a digital product or roadmap, or are just curious about what Agile is and how it helps companies grow, then this podcast is a must-listen.

In this episode, I sit down with Eric Dye of Enterprise Radio to talk about Agile and why more and more companies are adopting this transformative approach to mobile development.

Please listen to the podcast in the link above, and for those that like to browse ahead, check out our show notes.

Here are some highlights from the show:

1:49 — My goal in building Foxbox Digital was to help large companies build with the agility of a startup while using modern development practices.

2:15 — React Native is a really phenomenal cross-platform mobile framework and the reason I like it is because I think it's well-suited to 90% of the apps out there. It's something that gives you the benefits of cross-platform so you have one code base and one team building for both iOS and Android.

3:47 — Typically, the reason companies decide they need Agile is because they’re experiencing some symptoms, such as late project delivery or reliability issues that come up during the integration phase (or worse, when the product has gone live).

4:53 — In order for Agile to work for everyone, the entire organization has to be bought in. This means the UX folks, the product owners, the developers, DevOps, etc. must be brought out of their silos—so everyone is bought into Agile from the start.

5:36 — What doesn’t work with Agile is to just choose one group, say your UX team, to adopt this approach. It must be all or nothing.

6:10 — In order to do real work, you must have an extended period of time of uninterrupted focus. That's when you can really get your “deep work” done—things that matter.

6:40 — So Slack is a perfect avenue for people to interrupt you. It's become part of our culture for people to expect immediate responses. But that's unfair to you because that prevents you from doing actual work.