When I look back on my relationship with Agile, I realize my true awakening didn’t come from a book, a course, or a certification. It came from real work in 2015—when a friend and I co-founded a small studio focused on visual identity (VI) and website design and development.
At the time, we were only two or three people, and our roles were crystal clear:
- One person owned the overall brand image and visual direction.
- One focused on digital media design (mainly websites back then).
- And I was responsible for turning it into reality—development, verification, and testing.
Everything was manual. Designs started as hand-drawn sketches. Code had to be validated and tested repeatedly. And when it came to visual effects, we had to check details again and again—constantly hunting for bugs and fixing them fast.
Because we were short-handed, the early days were often chaotic. To keep delivery moving, we gradually built a way of working that became second nature:
- Put every task into a list.
- Prioritize hard and do the most critical work first.
- When new requests or changes came in, don’t just add more work—analyze impact, reassess importance, and reorder priorities.
Looking back, that was Agile.
The interesting part is that we were practicing these principles long before we knew the word “Agile.” At the time, we had no idea this field would later grow into such a large and structured discipline—with different schools of thought, countless tools, and constantly evolving methods.
I do regret not joining the global Agile community earlier. But I’m also grateful I kept working this way. That continuity is one reason I was able to understand, accept, and apply modern Agile thinking and tools quickly when I approached them more systematically later on.
For me, Agile was never theory first. It was a survival skill born in real delivery—and only later became a disciplined methodology.