THREE: Not Building in Real Customer Feedback Loops

The Challenge: A major tenet of Agile from the Agile Manifesto is, “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer.” However, let’s be clear. The Product Owner is NOT the customer. The people in marketing are NOT the customer. The CEO is NOT the customer. The only person that is the customer is… well… the Customer. This may sound like a “duh” moment, but this is by far the biggest challenge to Agile development teams working on market-focused products. When Agile first got traction with IT and internal development efforts, bringing customers directly into the Agile process was relatively straightforward. Just take a completed iteration down the hall and sit down with the “customer” to get their feedback. However, as Agile spreads to more open-market solutions gaining real customer feedback in a timely manner is more difficult, and is particularly challenging for a new project that doesn’t have any paying customers yet, and even more challenging for consumer-based products, where the “customer” often feels like a mass market of people.

There are several reasons we see why teams find it challenging to bring in real customers during the Agile development process:

1. The perception these activities will slow the team down.
2. The input is fuzzy, so often ignored.
3. Uncertainty of who the customer really is.
4. They just don’t know how or try to rely on traditional surveys or focus groups.

Because of these challenges, it’s easy for developers, or even Product Owners to take shortcuts and use personal opinions statements such as, “I’d want this feature,” “It should work like this,” or “The customer will need this,” to drive product decisions, rather than build in real customer feedback.

The Solution: To be truly Agile, it is critical to bring customers into your efforts at the right points and with the right methods. While gaining real customer insight throughout Agile planning and development may seem challenging, it doesn’t need to be. We use three simple and equally important steps to gain Rapid Customer Insight that support Agile development efforts. These steps are:

1. Access: You must find and identify a set of target customers that you can rely on to provide accurate, timely insight. These are often early adopter customers that will not only share their insight, but want to be part of your success. Successful Agile requires developing a well-maintained customer panel or advisory board.

2. Listen: Once you have direct and rapid access to customers, you must build skills to actively listen to them. This isn’t running a focus group, launching a survey, or asking them what they want. Although these methods can also be used, having high-quality interaction with your customers, either in person or through appropriate collaboration tools is critical, probing them for real needs, problems, desires, and objective feedback. Listening is also being able share early designs to learn how your customer is thinking, how they would prioritize elements of your solution, and the tradeoffs they are making in their head.

3. Communicate: This learned insight into your development efforts through clear and prioritized use cases, the relative value of each feature, and building test cases that reflect how your customers would want to experience your product.

Read part 1, 2 or download “The Five Challenges to Agile Planning” whitepaper.

TWO: Clarifying the Role of “Product Owner”

The Challenge: Another critical challenge that can cause short and long term angst is in selecting, defining, and empowering the role of “Product Owner” in your new Agile process. Let’s accept that this is one tough role. They are responsible for being “the voice of the customer,” the evangelist and decision-maker, and the perfect blend of business acumen and technical savvy.

Should you select a product manager who has previously been the product champion and tradeshow extraordinaire – but doesn’t know Agile software development? Or perhaps you should select a project manager or program manager that understands software development and perhaps has heard you should do some focus groups. Or perhaps you should nominate a solid, innovative architect that can design a 20 billion-user system? Whatever the choice, the Product Owner is a critical role to drive priorities, approve software releases, and be a liaison between development and the rest of the company… and often the market. Selecting the wrong person or incorrectly defining the product owner role leaves your Agile team limping along, or worst, at the whims of a control freak bent on driving personal opinions into the product.

The Solution: The role of Product Owner is indeed challenging. You should think about it more as a set of activities, interactions and desired outcomes rather than a job title and structure your team and responsibilities accordingly. As a “Product Owner”, one of their main roles is spending a significant amount of time directly with the development team. They must participate in every iteration review (often multiple meetings per week), write and review use cases, help write and approve test cases, and be available to review and approve software releases. This is a very hands-on role that requires serious time and commitment. If someone is this engaged with the development team, who is doing all that important market and customer work? It has be someone, or expect to fail. Someone, such as a Product Manager or Product Marketing Manager must take this more business-focused role and be the ying to the Product Owner’s yang. Getting these two roles in a room to work out how they will work together and how decisions will be made at the very tactical level is a key step to success. One tip – have the Product Manager participate in planning meetings, agree on priorities and implementation, then allow a more technical Product Owner to drive day-to-day decisions, write use cases, and approve test cases. Have them sync back up for software releases, and then fix any conflicts with the next Sprint. If one person is responsible for all of these activities, only a superhero will be successful except on small projects or in much-defined markets.

Read part 1 or download “The Five Challenges to Agile Planning” whitepaper.

How do you bridge the gap between development & the rest of the team?

If you have experience with Waterfall or traditional “phase-gate” developmental processes, then you know why Agile has gained traction so quickly. It’s a nimble, collaborative way to work. But like any professional process, it takes new skills to gain the promised benefits.

Follow this, five part, blog series and learn the major challenges that we’ve seen lead to Agile failure, as well as advice on how to make Agile work for your entire team.

ONE: Aligning “Vision” with “Iterations”

The Challenge: An early challenge you’ll experience is that the Agile team will want to self-organize and start writing code now… fast. They’ll want to define user stories, tasks and test cases “just enough” to create the first software iteration, or “Sprint” in Agile terms and deliver working code. The Product Owner (which we’ll discuss next) might state, “We know that customers will want to monitor every outlet and appliance in the house, let’s start with building a database schema that allows users to enter a list of these.”

While this is not inherently bad, getting started too quickly can be wasteful and set your team up for quick frustration, creating immediate conflict with other ideas about the major product attributes and how to get started on the right path. Management, and even some internal technical leaders such as Architects and Product Managers, will scream “Wait!” What are you building?” At which point the Agile development team might respond, “We’re just getting started… we’ll refine it along the way.” Unfortunately, this is little comfort for those that must communicate release plans, project scope, schedules, business models, ROI, and resource plans.

The Solution: Even the worst car drivers will have a general understanding of where they are going before making their first turn out of the drive way. There must be sufficient time and energy spent upfront to gain a solid grounding in the product vision and distilling it into “just enough” business requirements to provide direction to the development team on what is expected at a high level. Creating a vision, documenting a product plan and prioritizing use cases doesn’t need to take the months that a Waterfall approach might take, but certainly several weeks of thoughtful customer interaction, preliminary designs, and market analysis is required before getting started. The development team should participate of course in thinking about architecture, performance needs, user experience, platform needs, etc. However, even this front- end vision planning can apply Agile approaches using epics, fast prototyping (without writing code) and immediate customer feedback cycles to get clear, early guidance to kick off a new project. Light documentation of this vision, clarity on who you are targeting, why customers care, and your big picture roadmap will make everyone from the CEO to the receptionist ecstatic that you have a plan.

Download “The Five Challenges to Agile Planning” whitepaper.