In this stage, we put in place a briefing that includes the information gathered during the workshop with the team and stakeholders. It presents the vision and goals of the project and clarifies all necessary business requirements. This is also where an FAQ session relative to the nature of the project takes place.

The high-level architecture involves the development of the technical design, with the ideal balance between complexity and reach, This is where we identify external dependencies from third-party providers, such as Stripe, Facebook, Amazon, and so on.

We then start the CI/CD workflow which is the setup of the issue management tool, code repositories, continuous integration system, and development & staging environments. It’s followed by the setup of the code repo and automated test framework, the staging environment and production servers, as well as the continuous integration ecosystem (i.e. servers, deploy hooks, etc)/continuous deployment.

Finally, in Feature 0 we deliver the first meaningful feature: a homepage, a login screen, part of the first dashboard… This step ensures that there is something demonstrable with the perception of value at the end of the Bootstrap Phase.

With the Data Model, we provide the first baseline of the product’s evolutive data model. It identifies the main data entities and relationships and baselines the data sources and data stores (i.e. relational databases, document data stores, etc.). This step also consists of iterating the product concept and designing the first version of the data model.

Here’s when we present the Proof Of Concept (PoC), Minimal Testable Product (MTP), or Minimal Viable Product (MVP), and we deliver and deploy the first version of the product - even if that version is the implementation of a concept. This helps mitigate technical risks and test the main business premises for developing a market-ready version of the product through a viability assessment.

On the production increments step, we review technical and business risks and the impact of the PoC, MTP, or MVP on the initial premises or Wave 0. Here, we also identify reusable components from Wave 0 to Wave 1 (i.e. often PoCs are not reusable). This helps gather feedback about the first integrated model and assesses the product's viability before moving to Wave 1.

Finally, the wave retrospective reviews the product state, evaluates wave success against business goals, and identifies improvements. We then design goals for the next wave & prioritize features. Doing this allows the team to analyze the work that has been done in previous sprints and plan consciously what should be the next mountain to climb.