An Explainer on Reaction Agility

Reaction Agility is the culmination of David’s experience, training, and skills, designed specifically to make Business Agility happen.

Simply put, Reaction Agility is putting your eyeballs and your metrics on the ball. Companies go through the effort of an agile transformation to better respond to changes in the market.

By tracking metrics around the big picture, we will drive discussion and focus on things that matter. Too often agile transformations focus on the easy metrics – ones that you can get by clicking on a button or two in a tracking software such as Jira or Azure DevOps.

This involves a lot of upfront gathering of requirements, waiting, and then after a period of 6-12 months, it’s placed in front of the customer only to then determine how the market reacted to it.

In larger enterprises, they practice agile but it still has planning up front, generally quarterly:

But what I find most interesting is the metrics are development focused, not marketing-focused, such as cycle time:

For example, if you were to ask someone, even an agile coach, what you call the metric the measures from a change in the market to a response to that change, they wouldn’t have a term for it, much less give you the measurements for it.

Simply stated, reaction metrics are establishing the focus on the reason that companies go agile.

And let’s take a look at other metrics as well: