Customer-Centric Agile

“Quality”… velocity, productivity, and efficiency? Improved performance? Few or no bugs? Meets stakeholder requirements? “Done”… we did what we planned? Fits business objectives? Coded, tested, documented, and deployable?

Remember our customers? The people paying our salaries? Their satisfaction is supposed to be our *highest* priority. But we fall in love with assumptions about users. We burn weeks coding, testing, merging, and releasing product guesses. We move to the next project, and are interrupted later when we learn that customers aren’t finding much value or quality in that last release. Guessing, assuming, and being reactive aren’t Agile or Lean. Six Sigma would be ashamed of you.

“Architecting for customers’ needs and tasks” and “being Agile” shouldn’t be the polar opposites they often are now. No matter what an Agile coach, scrum master, or stakeholder declares, the customer decides what is “quality,” “done,” and “good enough.”

Learn how to change processes to improve agility, eliminate some Lean waste, and produce better customer outcomes.

Key Takeaways:

1. Tips for shifting Agile back towards “our highest priority is customer satisfaction.”
2. We must shoot for 5-star quality out of 5 stars, and from the perspective of the user.
3. Where the MVP concept, “just ship it,” and “we’ll fix it later” have gone wrong and need reframing.
4. How these problems have negatively affected culture.
5. The best ways to get customer feedback and feed that back into the process.
6. Shifting away from trends we pretend are Agile and Lean but are huge time wasters focusing on product guesses.
7. Predicting and mitigating the business risk poor product has been causing.

Format: Interactive presentation or workshop (polls Q&A).

This presentation/training is also called, “Improving Agility By Using Customers’ Definitions of “Quality” and “Done”.”

Customized versions and lengths available. Training is available on-site or live and remote, webinar-style.