Your goal is to build and cultivate an agile mindset.

Agile mindset...what does that even mean?

1. It means you approach your day-to-day work with the agile ideas and concepts in mind. Using agile in practice starts with the way you think. This way of thinking helps you become a more efficient, flexible, and high-performing team member. It allows your mind to be open to continuous learning and improvement.
2. As you start building your mindset, remember to be patient with yourself. Establishing a new way of thinking requires forming new habits, which take time and energy.
3. Your agile mindset is a long journey that will be developed and refined over many years. This is just the beginning.

How do you build an agile mindset?

1. Show respect for all the team members.
2. Healthy, high-performing teams create a culture of trust and mutual respect. That's the backbone of agility.
3. Having an agile mindset means you embrace different ways of thinking and working, even if you don't always agree with them. Focus on keeping an open mind and seeking to understand new and unexpected ideas.
4. Communicate Openly and Clearly.
5. Share updates. Ask questions. Be open and transparent at all times. With each interaction, challenge yourself to communicate clearly and concisely.
6. Encourage your team to engage in frequent discussions. Quality discussions can reveal critical information that moves the work forward and helps the team feel more connected.
7. Look for ways to innovate
8. Agility is all about delivering maximum value to customers. When a customer's needs change, you need to respond quickly with an innovative solution.
9. Having an agile mindset means you're constantly looking for opportunities to innovate. This could mean improving your team's internal processes. Or enhancing features of the product you're building.
10. As you complete your daily tasks, think if there are ways to improve what you're doing. Analyzing and improving your team's work will be valuable for your future career.
11. Actively improve your skills
12. Agile is all about continuous improvement. In your daily work, always look for opportunities to learn and grow your skillset.
13. Pause for a minute and think about your current skills: Which skills seem to be most valuable? Which skills mesh well with your natural tendencies? Use these questions as a starting point to help you plan which skills to sharpen.
14. Prioritizing your skill development is always a good idea. Not only does it help your team, but it also improves your future career opportunities.
15. Your work doesn't have to be prefect.
16. Your goal is to deliver something that works: an MVP. Not to make every detail perfect.
17. Shift your mindset to focus on doing "good enough" work, and then get immediate feedback to improve the next version. Try to adopt this approach for both large and small tasks.
18. "Good enough" is different for every team and every project. If the parameters are not clear, you may want to discuss them with your team leader.
19. Have a plan, but always ready to pivot.
20. An agile mindset is about being flexible and ready for any unpredictable change. Yes, you should always have a Plan A (and B and C, if time allows). But, you'll be most successful at work if your mind is always prepared to pivot.
21. Change will come. It always does. Your job is to prepare your brain to stay calm and collected so that you can handle each emotional wave with ease. If everyone on the team is ready for change, you'll be able to bounce back quickly and refocus energy on solving new problems.

Frameworks and mindsets.

What's the difference?

1. Your agile mindset will help you think about your work in an agile way, regardless of how your team is structured. Most teams looking to take full advantage of agile use a specific agile framework to put the ideas into practice.
2. An agile framework provides specific guidelines for how teams should be organized and structure their work. Kanban and scrum are the two most common agile frameworks.

Kanban is a framework that helps your team visualize work and continuously improve. Using a visual board to track work, kanban allows team members to see the status of every work item, at any time.	Scrum is a framework that focuses on iterative and incremental deliveries. Work gets completed in short, time-boxed increments. Teams are encouraged to reflect and learn from experience, always focused on continuous improvement.

1. Agile itself is not a framework. This is important to understand. Agile is a set of ideas, but it does not provide instructions on how to apply those ideas to your work. That's what agile frameworks, like kanban and scrum, are meant to accomplish.