I know it's Pi Day, but for me, the more important thing is that it's Milestone Day.

I haven't been talking much about my work, because, well, it's not secret but it's definitely not meant to be public yet, either. But today we hit an important milestone: we finished the last stories that we had earmarked for the MVP version.

This project started almost a year ago. It's an ambitious new set of features that will help push one of our flagship products into a new market segment. If we nail it, it has the potential to double the addressable market for the product.

Here's what's terrifying: this is the first project I have led. By all rights, a big, new initiative like this, something the C-suite is watching closely, should have an experienced veteran heading up the development team, but instead they picked... me. It's true that it has been years since I've been shy about voicing my ideas and opinions. I've spent a good few years telling my team leads what they ought to be doing, and it was great; I got to have all the opinions with none of the responsibility for choosing whether to follow my advice. Well, friends, they called me on my bullshit, and here we are.

And you know what? It's been so. much. fun! I have a fantastic team: two solid seniors, three mid-levels like me, a very green junior, and a QA specialist. We have developed really great team processes so that we are working efficiently and effectively. Having a good team means that I can spend my time on the stuff I like and that I'm good at (communication, coordination, planning, workflows, patterns, debugging and writing code) instead of having to worry about whether people are doing their jobs.

In a couple of weeks, this feature set is going to be announced to the world. Our sales team is going to actively start selling it. March 25 has been on our calendars for a solid year as MVP day, and we made it, with a couple of weeks to spare.

Along the way, the scope has changed, a lot. When I first came onboard, we had vague ideas of the problems we wanted to solve, but were still trying to figure out how solutions could slot into our existing product(s). Fast forward, and we now have customers in a beta program who have been "testing" the new features as we work on them. Some of the biggest, most complex parts of this were such a hit that they quit "testing" and just started using them as part of their core, business-critical workflow, months before we were ready to call them done. That meant that the last 20% of the work (which always takes the longest, am I right?) had to be done without interrupting these customers. But because we have customers so excited for the features, and actively involved in the beta process, we have gotten great feedback that has helped us adjust features and requirements, re-prioritize work, and build with the confidence that what we are making will be genuinely useful.

Y'all, this is what it feels like to Agile good. And I love it.

I'll be able to talk more about the project after it goes public at Distributech in a couple of weeks. Until then, I'm just going to revel in the feeling that we have done good work and delivered what feels like a real MVP in time.

Signing off for a gorgeous March weekend...