How to improve customer-centricity from the start at agile projects

” Customer-oriented product development can be the key to success for a product. Therefore, spreading a customer-centric mindset is essential. ”

Responsibility for customer-centric design activities

Although customer value should be the focus for all members of its agile team, clear responsibilities for customer-centric design activities are required. Those responsible should be experienced in both research and design methods, have the ability to cooperate with other departments and stakeholders, always apply a birds eye view, be prone to self-reflection and be able to apply these skills creatively in the agile context. Like all agile team members, they should be independent in the way they achieve their goals and have sufficient resources to devote to the goals without distractions.

Backlog for research or research for backlog?

Designers do not necessarily always have a say in deciding the next topics for research, design or development. This can lead to design becoming a rubber stamp in the middle of a process rather than an activity that impacts how the team produces value. If product managers dictate what topics are selected for upfront research and development, design cannot influence how the team creates customer value.

Customer insights should be at the heart of decision-making when the team plans what to work on next. The team should be careful that its goals do not conflict with the goals of the customers and end users to avoid doing work without value. The customer experience should not be neglected just because the team is short on time or another solution is easier to implement.

Find agile ways to gather customer insights and create a community.

Trying to do research for every goal and every development topic will most likely lead to bottlenecks and overworked designers. Choose the most important research topics based on what you doubt the most, and validate the safer topics after development. Building a pool of enthusiastic customers and end-users can make collecting feedback faster and more relaxed at the same time. Being able to join such a community can also improve the customer experience.

Focus on learning after development

If a team is able to release frequently, it is important to spend time after development learning from customer and end-user feedback, rather than just working towards the next features. It should be in the interest of the whole team and organisation to learn whether the solutions are creating the intended value. What should be improved and what should be focused on next. Reserve time and create rituals to make this happen.

Bring customer insights into the teams daily work.

If your team is not articulating their goals in a way that describes outcomes for the customer or end user, its time to challenge this. Job stories are an example of an effective and simple format for describing goals in agile teams. The best place to document customer insights is directly in the tickets the team uses to manage their work. By populating the tickets with user data, comments and attachments, you ensure that customer insights find their way to the developers.

Often an agile team has no documentation of the customer experience other than the service itself. If the team lacks a shared understanding of the experience they are creating, a classic customer journey map can be helpful. However, a more concrete and practical choice for agile teams is story mapping, where the team creates the customer journey using their own story tickets as building blocks. In all meetings and points of collaboration, designers should act as the voice of the customer and use the opportunities to stimulate and inspire all team members to think about the customer value.

Reviews, reflections and dailies are great for this, but you can also introduce your own informal coffee breaks or something more relaxed.

Tips for putting the customer at the centre from the start and bringing customer-centricity to teams:

• Creating the foundational architecture of the experience helps us scale later as new features are introduced. We need to start with the up-front research and design phase before sprint-based development.
• We share customer research insights as high up in the organisation as possible for impact.
• We create a strategy for sharing customer insights.
• We always make sure that all key stakeholders have been captured.
• in conflict situations, we use the organisations written strategic goals and objectives to justify customer-centric activities.
• We visualise the roadmap together to see if there is a lack of customer understanding somewhere. For example, use story mapping.
• We keep the focus on the current goals of the team.
• We always bring the entire customer journey into the discussion, even when developing smaller features.
• We avoid quick hotfix solutions that dont support the big picture when it is still possible.
• We look for opportunities to share customer understanding.
• We incorporate our thoughts and customer insights directly into tasks and tickets.
• We keep reminding the team that we are supposed to deliver value, not features.

Clarification of Terms

Customer

In this article we mainly talk about customer orientation and customer value. These terms refer not only to customers, but also to potential end users and other stakeholders.

Team

Team refers to all the people involved in creating a product for the customers and end users. Whether they are developers, designers, product owners, managers or other specialists, everyone is seen as part of the team.

Design

We do not draw boundaries between different design roles and designations (UI designer, UX designer, product designer, service designer, ...), as many types of designers are valuable members of a cross-functional agile team. However, we strongly define design by a customer-centric mindset and put it in the context of teams developing software as part of the service.

Agile

The word agile is a characteristic that describes certain software development teams. Agile teams have the autonomy to organise their work in short feedback loops that allow them to constantly evolve the way they work, learn from customer feedback and adjust their goals to maximise customer value.