Agile for efficiency. Agile for understanding

I started my agile journey since I believed agile would be more efficient. I had read about the new methods and those lightweight methods were said to be the modern way to make products happen. My mind immediately connected speed of product development and agile.??

Agile is not only about efficiency and speed.??

There is also a vital aspect of creating understanding of your customers in agile. I claim that this goal is even more important than the speediness of making things. The point is about understanding and creating accurate enough models of customers and then to innovate better outcomes for customers. The goal of agile is to create superior customer understanding.??

Agile for efficiency is needed. This article is about agile for understanding.?

The limits of our understanding?

A thriving business has countless customers. Customers have their own sovereignty – they can themselves decide what they want. And people are all different. We don't all want the same things. We don't think alike. When we want the same things, even then our preferences and circumstances differ.??

We as humans and teams are limited. Our cognition – even the great collective team understanding – cannot observe and comprehend the totality of the customer world.?

There is always more to be known about customers. The detail of their story and preference is infinite. In life, we learn to understand our family members and closest friends. And then time after time they surprise us with something completely new.??

All of this customer preference, circumstance, and want is too much for us to scientifically analyse and take in. We could always try and interview more. We could try and create longer surveys. The more we have data, the less this data fits into our brains. Our understanding cannot absorb it all in one go.??

Business is a race to learn the most important and valuable learnings. Succeeding in a competitive marketplace is race against time and race against competition.??

Creating the future not the past?

Business success can be viewed as creating a healthy basis for future success. The world moves on and our customers evolve. Technology evolves concurrently and great solutions of yesterday are nowadays losing competitive edge. Customers change their preference over time.?

The future will be different from the history. The problem with future strategy is that we cannot predict nor force a certain future to happen. As Roger L Martin put it

A central task in successful innovation is to generate data that will provide guidance on and encouragement for the task of creating a future that does not now exist — and is markedly superior to the world that exists today.?

You need to constantly create new data and new understanding of customers. You need to create a theory of the future your customers would prefer.??

Create understanding iteratively. Scale what resonates.??

From the infinite input set of data, observation and customer study we create generalisations and models. We often don't think about this much, but we tend to look for recurring patterns. "Our customers mostly live in the Nordics", "People want to drive (a car)" or "people have a need to go from place A to B". We look at all the input data and find a pattern. We throw out plenty of detail to find what we think is essential. We then use our models to find the next value propositions for our customers.??

?We use our judgment to find the essential customer problems and solutions from the vast amount of information.?

We could try and make this filtering and transformation of input data into a neat step-wise process. But that would be analytical and a waterfall-like process. I prefer to allow our brains work and make novel connections. We can help our brains on the journey by being iterative, incremental and agile.??

Here's a list of three iterative and incremental mechanics to employ in creating understanding.??

1. Mirroring: Having taken in the data about customers, say out loud the central points?as you've understood. Verbalise?the essential model as it stands in your brain. Listen attentively if your interpretation was right. You get validation for your thinking in seconds rather than at the end of the process.?
2. Draw your own picture of the future: You can do this in pictures or in words. Create an illustration of the world to be, where the customer receives new kind of value from your product. Show the picture to your colleagues and customers. See if there are nods and smiles. Absorb any feedback and make corrections to the picture.??
3. Take educated guesses and test: Apply your understanding of the customer and the future. You cannot control the future, but you can create an opinion on what the future should be like. Make choices and be opinionated. Make your stance clear on what the future ought to be. Create an opinionated prototype.?Test?your opinionated choice with customers. Listen to feedback and adjust your base assumptions or choices.??

You build the first real version after?you find customers who appear to be in critical need of the product you are imagining. ?

All of the actions above to me is the agile for understanding. We build half-formed versions of future products to better be able to understand and match what customers really want. I suppose we will never fully understand what every customer wants. That even wouldn't be the point of business - to satisfy everyone. Rapid prototyping, startup thinking and pilots are all about accumulating understanding and concurrently building your product.??

It is like finding a needle in a haystack. Or maybe a more apt metaphor is finding nuggets of gold in sand. You have to sift through lots of sand to find bigger and smaller pieces of gold. In product development, this shifting of sand is the act of listening to customers, creating more understanding, making choices and then validating. We validate whether something that looks like gold is really gold.??

Start a movement, see if there are followers. Start with the essence. Iterate to detail when there is traction. Start with few core assumptions. Validate them. Build on top of this knowledge more detail. Validate with customers again. Use agile for understanding.??

Some designers say that they "build to think". Let your own understanding emerge in the agile process.?

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