Praise for Agile for Everybody

Agile for Everybody puts culture, collaboration, and customer centricity into the focus of facilitating organizational change. Matt LeMay explains why organizations and leaders are changing their mindsets and working styles in order to have a deeper understanding of their customers and how to design and iterate quickly to create better products and work environments. Agile for Everybody shows how this practice is accessible to everyone who wants to improve company culture, embrace an iterative design process, and be able to react to fast-changing customer needs.

Jessica Covi, Creative Director, BMW Group

If you’re intrigued by Agile but wondering if it’s really possible for it to work in your unique context, Agile for Everybody has you covered. It’s a clear, concise, clever guide to evolving the Agile mindset so it seamlessly applies to knowledge work of all kinds. With this book, Matt is helping put better, faster, more innovative work within reach for everybody.

Andrea Fryrear, President and Lead Trainer, AgileSherpas

As the rate of change of, literally, everything continues to accelerate, it is paramount that our understanding of how to actually “be” Agile versus “do” Agile, scales accordingly. Agile for Everybody takes the refreshing, and much needed, perspective of Agile as something more than tools and practices.

Andrew Burrows, Agile Marketing Lead, IBM

Agile for Everybody is refreshing precisely because it exemplifies the spirit of generosity that defines Agile’s origin story. There’s no prescriptive finger-wagging, just a simple, honest sharing of experiences. Matt LeMay’s great gift to the reader is attraction through candid storytelling. I put the book down with a few specific ideas to try, but with also a sense of possibility. In the end, that’s the best feeling I can hope for when I finish a book.

Baron Schwartz, Founder and CTO, VividCortex

Agile for Everybody is a masterpiece in applied learning. With this book, Matt has distilled years of Silicon Valley jargon into easy-to-learn language and an easy-to-adopt playbook for nearly every audience. This book is the perfect primer for anybody who wants to transform their organizational thinking into a proactive, problem-solving mindset through an iterative, customer-centric lens. I’m recommending this to our executive leadership team as soon as it’s released.

Zach Harris, Senior Director, Data and Strategy, Children’s Tumor Foundation

Agile for Everybody is a refreshing guide to seeing success from the right point of view and making it work. Without jargon, Matt shares how to understand where a team is, quick tips to improve, and why it matters. If you’ve seen Agile “inflicted” on projects that didn’t work, the examples in this book can help you understand why. Every leader can use the Agile-focused wisdom in this book. Contained within are actionable tips for everybody: CIOs, mayors, teams large and small, police commanders, and you. The lessons fit multinational corporations, government agencies, startups, non profits, and small businesses. Reading Agile for Everybody will help you inspire people to do their best work with the values of Agile.

Andrew Nebus, Former CIO and Command Staff, Baltimore City Police Department

Matt’s book is a perfect primer on the theory and practice of Agile. For the executive, it’s a terrific guide about why you should care (happier customers, more engaged employees). For the manager, it’s a great set of practical tools and advice about how Agile works and how and where it can successfully be applied (achieving quick wins, measuring success, course correcting).

Thomas Stubbs, Vice President, Engineering and Innovation, Coca-Cola Freestyle

The language and spirit of Agile is everywhere in business today. But what does it really mean and how can we act on the insights that turned a way of writing software into a way of getting almost anything done? Matt LeMay makes it clear what Agile is (and what it isn’t) and reminds us what’s truly valuable about the movement. Agile for Everybody lives up to its name.

Andrew Blau, Managing Director, Strategic Risk, Deloitte

Successfully implementing Agile is about more than just changing the way you operate and execute; it is about changing your organization’s entire culture. It is that culture that ultimately creates successes, failures, and all the exciting moments in between. Agile for Everybody is a must-read for understanding how you can bring the values and principles of Agile to your organization and to your individual work. This book makes a compelling case that Agile learning is ongoing and left me feeling particularly excited to continue evolving the practices used throughout my teams.

Jarrod Dicker, CEO, po.et

Far from yet another step-by-step Agile coaching tome, Agile for Everybody forces us to recognize that agility does not come in a pre-sliced, neatly packaged kit. Matt LeMay illustrates the creative challenge presented when integrating Agile values with existing, complex systems. He then invites us to join him on a journey beyond the standard Agilist jargon and into the real work of cultural change.

Courtney Hemphill, Partner and Technical Lead, Carbon Five

Agile practices have exploded in popularity in recent years, yet so often they are implemented in an unhelpful way, focused on velocity over impact, as if running faster without removing the blindfold were ever a good idea. As LeMay points out, speed matters, but only speed in the eyes of the customer, not the eyes of the development team. This book brings us back to the values of the Agile movement and gives us concrete and immediate recommendations for orienting our teams towards them. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to solve the right problems well.

Jason Stanley, Design Research Lead, Element AI

There are many books about Agile, but none has delved into the nuances of implementing it successfully within an organization—until now. With Agile for Everybody, Matt has synthesized what is working today for software development teams and put together a practical guide with great shortcuts for readers.

Alfredo Fuentes, CTO, La Victoria Labs

Matt LeMay demands the frequent, pointed questioning of our organizational practices that is too-often absent from today’s companies. Agile for Everybody is, indeed, for everybody...that is, for anyone who wants to do better and be better, both in the workplace and in life.

David Kidder, Cofounder and CEO, Bionic