Agile mindset - Customer Centricity
Customer centricity is extremely critical for all agile teams, as its the essence of all agile values and principles of the agile manifesto such as "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation", "Customer satisfaction is the highest priority" and "harnessing change for customer's competitive advantage".
Ensuring that the customer is satisfied and has a competitive advantage is a key to producing awesome business outcomes for agile teams. Wanted to take an opportunity here to put together thoughts around how much customer centricity is important for an agile mindset.
For agile teams, product owners are treated as customers, or representatives of the customers. The team would treat the product owners as the content authority and take their word for the content as well as priority needed for the functionality. But for all practical purposes, product owners though mostly from business simply represent the end users. The product owners surely gain a lot of knowledge about what the wants and needs of the end users are through various means such as user research, market research and learning about their behaviour with the product, pain points and so on. Product owners also ensure that the voices of all the stakeholders and all different types of end users are taken into account and prioritized into the product backlog. However the team should realize this clearly that product owner is still not the end user or the end customer.
Typically the agile teams' interaction with business starts and ends with the interactions they have with the product owners. However I have seen a lot of agile teams benefit from interacting with the stakeholders and more importantly the end users. After a critical feature production rollout when the team interacts with end users to explain them, participate in road shows or demonstrations to them, helping the product owner in the user adoption, the team enriches its knowledge about how the users actually use the systems multifold. This Gemba concept definitely helps them to make their contribution to the product more meaningful.
The team with this customer centricity in mind can really bring in important perspective of asking questions to the product owners to understand how a particular story or feature would help the end customer, why is it important to be prioritized, understanding the "so what" of the story. This in turn helps to enrich the "Acceptance Criteria" or "Confirmation" part of the user story through meaningful "conversations".
Customer centricity mindset will also drive the agile teams to push for getting feedback from the end users as priority. The team can help in institutionalizing several ways into the product as well as through analytics and monitoring tools to know how the customer is using the product and learn from that behavior. The lean startup concept of Build - Measure - Learn reflects the benefits of measuring the user's response to what has been built and learning from it very well. This is definitely a great way to ensure that the product is centered around the customer.
The product owners with the mindset of customer centricity step up their product ownership knowledge by engaging in relevant user experience, design thinking and other user research methods, so that what gets built really matters to the customers. While the agile teams focus on building the thing right, customer centricity helps them to build the right thing.