One of the founding principles of Agile Software Development manifesto teaches us to value customer collaboration over contract negotiation. In this modern world we often hear calls to "fail fast and often" and for "end of sprint customer demos". As the product managers of hi tech products we ought to accept the uncertain nature of innovation. At the same time, while we are innovating, we should strive to keep up with the ever transforming reality of our customers world, avoiding the trap of the ivory tower. The ultimate success in our job comes with the product that every customer wants to have, not necessarily a research paper published in the scientific journal.
So, let’s engage our customers early and often. Let’s validate our vision, feature list, deployment diagram, UI wireframe, first build, second build and so on. Let’s not wait for feature completeness, code freeze or QA approval. Don’t be afraid, customers will understand the early nature of what they are looking at. They will appreciate the opportunity to have a say in what’s being built for them. Come back next sprint or iteration and show them your progress. If you are truly on track to develop something that will solve their real problems, customers will actively participate, test and feed ideas.
Don’t be afraid to engage too many customers. The more voices you hear the better you will be equipped to guide your team to deliver the product for your market rather than for a handful most vocal customers.
On a practical side, get ready to collaborate in three key areas:
- Questions: a message board of some sort might work well, make sure your responses are visible to others so you don’t have to repeat yourself;
- Ideas: if possible find a way to let your customers submit their ideas and vote up/down on ideas posted by others;
- Defects: look for a way to track them using a structured defect tracking tool.
As you move through the release cycle, you will notice the distribution between these three areas changes. Questions and ideas typically dominate the early part of the project. In the latter stages, as we often shift focus to stability and performance, majority of the feedback tends to be centered around defects. Anticipate this shift and be ready to deal with it.
Happy collaboration!
