The Connection Between Delivering Value Frequently and Stocks

When thinking about the first and third principles behind the Agile Manifesto that state the following:

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”

“Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”

I can’t help but think of the stock market. In the stock market, your stocks could be worth a certain amount of dollars and could keep climbing up but until you actually sell these stocks, you can’t realize their cash value. And if the market falls, that perceived value plummets too. 

Same thing happens with potentially stoppable increments of the product an Agile team is delivering. Until these potentially stoppable increments of the product are deployed and in the hands of the customer, you can’t really say you are delivering value to the customer.

Additionally, while business value is delivered to the customer, valuable feedback heads to the Agile team.

The more frequent the deployments are, the more real value and feedback are truly created and realized.