A great agile design process is complementary to a great agile development process and produces products that people love enough to generate real value.

The right amount of design, and how far ahead that design needs to occur, varies significantly by task. Knowing what it is you're building before development starts leads to a much more focused (i.e. better, faster, cheaper) product. However, high fidelity, pixel-level design work is best done with the designer pairing directly with the developer rather than producing documentation that becomes ever more stale between writing and implementation. The investment in a 500 page PRD filled with pixel-perfect photoshop comps is one that tends to bring more rigidity than value to a product. Design ideas need to be tested as quickly as possible, so that the design process, like the development process, benefits from a short feedback loop and real user validation.

A great agile design is thematic and generative. It consists of a coherent vision, and a set of rules we can apply to new problems as the application develops.

There is a tension in the agile world between the notion of ultimate flexibility that agile proposes and the need for coherency and excellence that great design provides. This talk is intended to provide a framework to help yourself ask -- as a designer or as a developer -- "What is Enough Design?", and to share our experience as to what has worked well in practice on our many projects at Pivotal Labs.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Diego Basch and Santiago Perez Gonzales of Flaptor describe their new product IndexTank, a hosted, scalable, real-time search solution. They share the features and the API of the service and the benefits that make IndexTank an interesting choice when considering search platforms. They also show examples on how to migrate a ThinkingSphinx based solution to IndexTank.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer, two of the four founders of Diaspora, discuss the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network. Diaspora aims to put users back in control of their data and privacy, and to make sharing between the people they care about easier and more meaningful. Started by four NYU students in April of 2010, they set out on a summer of development (with a bit of help from the internet) they hope to make their first open source release in mid September, and create a free hosted joindiaspora.com around mid October.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring.

Sequoia Capital, a Menlo Park, CA company, is looking for an Agile UI Developer to join their team. The full job posting follows.

At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring.

EMI Capitol Records is hiring Ruby, Java and Javascript engineers in San Francisco and New York City to build applications that help connect fans with their favorite artists. This is a chance to be a part of something very new and innovative, while representing some of the greatest musicians in history. Send us your questions and resume ASAP, we are interviewing candidates now.

Contact: eric.mittler@emimusic.com