You can't always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes you find you get what you need.

Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones

Businesses want to get new products into the market as quickly as possible, and then iterate on this initial offering so that it is refined and shaped into things of value. Too often, though, their products are based upon arbitrary assumptions and speculative conclusions.

Research by Tom Wujec using the marshmallow challenge. Lessons - prototyping and iterations made all the difference. Who did that in trials? Not CEOs. Not average people. Kindergartners.

The lessons? Learn by doing. Work in parallel. Manage constraints. 

Focus

• Minimum viable product
• Balanced trade-offs between features, cost, schedule, and quality

Intentions

• Measures of effectiveness

To achieve this speed,

Harvest quotes from Chet Richards: 

Summarize what OODA loops are. Talk about what agility means - being able to operate 'inside the decision loop of competition'.

• Orienting

  It is often helpful to use a set of organizing questions to help shape the scope of the endeavor, and begin to establish connections between actions and consequences. By focusing on such questions, the resulting dialog can help a community to become aware of what they know or believe, and begin to understand the chasm between their problem and solution spaces. 

  Nearly all observations will be mixture of objective and subjective assessments; context, feedback, and use of the resulting information in decision-making is critical to assuring that measurements have value over time.

• Observing

  Root cause analysis

• Deciding
• Acting

One of the best examples in which this has worked can be found in Google maps.  Over the period in which this product has been in the market has come to dominate the market and displaced long forgotten products like Microsoft's Streets. because of it's also become a critical part of the Google infrastructure and platform strategy not everybody has been a successful take other products that have come and gone.

Google is notable for a number of products that have been less than successful. Their current CEO has begun to make decisions and act about many of their products, and this has brought a new focus to the organization. you have products for four I'm sharing products for buzz over all these products came and went but what they seem to mess with the critical functionality that users wanted upfront. If you mess this minimum Acceptable functionality you're not probably going to get another chance The Nortel bomb side is a classic example of a product it never got it right and yet continued to be the dominant play for most of the different defense establishment The amazing thing is it really never work and it's only real accomplishment in the war was being able to drop a nuclear weapon and precision isn't exactly the biggest requirement in the block.

What's critical in both many iterations, and getting a product into the market quickly in the first place, is raw speed. Speed may kill teenage drivers, but it is a critical discriminator in business. (rant about speed).

The rate of learning is a great indicator, as Donald Reinertsen indicates: