REBELxLABS is all about the intersection of leadership and life design. I work with inspiring professionals and leaders who have taken the leap to work and travel from anywhere in the world while taking the lead in how they design their own life.

As a former CTO and Chief Product Officer, I spent decades building software products using agile development methodologies. For those of you unfamiliar with agile development, here is a highly oversimplified and brief history.

After many years of defining every requirement, then building and testing over months or possibly years, and spending a whole lot of money, many software organizations found that by the time they shipped their product, the market had changed or assumptions they made proved to be false, and the product was a flop. So, a new movement was born: agile development.

In agile development, you build in short iterations focused on validating your assumptions, and you get some basic form of your product out to the end customer as soon as possible to get feedback and learn what works and what doesn’t. You then make the next iteration of decisions from there.

There is much to be learned in designing your life from agile development.

Here are some lessons from agile development to apply to life design.

Get to Know Your Customer (You)

It’s important to know who you are designing for, what their pain points are, and what success looks like. I often ask my clients to imagine a day in their ideal life. When are they waking up? What are they having for breakfast? Where are they? Who are they with? What are they wearing? How do they spend their day? What are they thinking/feeling/doing?

We do this to bring the vision to life and uncover what it is they really want, the essence of the experience, the activities that light them up, and the person they want to become.

Stay Flexible

Assume that anything can change at any time. Digital nomad life means embracing the fact that new opportunities and changes to the plan can happen at any moment, and that’s often the BEST PART. You meet new people, hear of new “must see” places, or sometimes get thrown a curveball you didn’t expect. It’s important to anticipate changes. The more you see curveballs as opportunities, the better.

Iterate and Learn

I would have never been able to design my current “work from anywhere” life from my “full time CTO” life because my decisions were based on the information I had at that time, and I’ve learned so much in the 7+ years since. Each time you take a step, you learn something new, and that in turn informs your next step. If you plan a 2-month itinerary in Costa Rica before you leave home, it will look VERY different than if you plan the first 2 weeks and then plan the rest as you go. Stay open to new information, as each door opens new options.

Build Prototypes

One of my favorite ways that I marry my product development and coaching experience is in helping my clients’ design life prototypes. I love this idea so much, I got my certification with Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, the creators of Design Thinking and Designing Your Life, because prototyping is a fundamental pillar to their approach.

A good friend of mine called me last summer dreaming of moving to Malibu with her son. She had visited a friend and was absolutely in love with beach life, but couldn’t imagine how she could even begin to make that possible. What budget would she need? Would she find community? Could she rent out her house in Vegas? Would her son be able to go to school there?

So we designed a prototype.

She prototyped a move to Malibu by renting a place there for a week. She listed her house on Airbnb to see how much she might be able to make and used the week to build a budget of what it might cost to live there. While there, a friend introduced her to the community so she could get a “taste” of what it would be like to live there. They even checked out some schools.

She “pretended” to live there for a month and at the end of that month, she had a much better sense of what it would take, and how her idea of what it would be like to live there compared to the reality of her experience.

Prototyping comes in all forms and sizes. If she hadn’t been able to rent a place for a week, she could have instead made a list of people she knew who lived there and conducted informational interviews with them to get as close as she could to being there herself.

**What life choices can you start prototyping?**

Reflect at regular intervals

“What went well?”, “What can we do better?”, and “What actions can we take?”. These are the three categories of a typical agile retrospective meeting where teams reflect and learn. Imagine if we asked ourselves these questions every year much less every few months?

Journaling is a powerful place to design a reflective practice. Taking time regularly to extract the learning and create actions to integrate that learning will create an iterative evolution of your life design that will continuously optimize for your ideal experience.

The goal is to get you living in alignment and realizing your vision as soon as possible. Many people think they need to wait for the perfect opportunity, the bulletproof plan or to have it “all figured out” before they make the leap. But the risk is, you may never do it, or when you finally do, all of your assumptions are wrong.

It all starts with the first step, the first prototype. Get out there, start trying it on, start gathering new information, and from there you keep iterating.

Feeling stuck and want some help making your leap. Tell me a little more and let’s set up a complimentary sample session!