Customers are Agile Oriented by design, Dev Teams are not!
In a world of Digital Projects, everything is different than traditional ones. Even if on the customer's side they are not aware of the "Agile" methodology, customers are the best Agilists by design.
For me; if we think that customers are the source of failure for Digital Projects, then we are not even close to being true Agilists.
The most valuable concept in Agile is that it amplifies "Visibility" for the product owners/customers, once the PO have the right insight, then they will be capable for sailing the project to Safe Haven. So, would that visibility be something difficult to achieve for Development teams? In most of the times; Yes.
Not truly understanding the Agile mindset in fact would lead to much less visibility to the product owner (PO), thus; unpredictable decisions would be made, that from the development teams perspective could also sound unwise, thinking that they could be a better decision makers than the product owner, which is true, if the PO do not have the right visibility to lead it off.
The reason again for such situations is missing the Agile mindset, a simple example would be being able to decompose the features as small as possible, when doing so; the PO would benefit so much, such as: Team's velocity per functionality, cost and feature's expectations. These factors would be the guidance to the PO for better decision making in future sprints/iterations. Sounds easy? Actually it is not, the resistance from the developers/testing teams to decompose functionality as much as possible is a common thing.
I have witnessed in so many cases teams saying that this functionality could not be decomposed/sliced any further, were it could, hence delaying the visibility for the PO multiple future sprints.
Visibility in digital projects is as equally important to following the best practices of the SDLC as well as all the efforts from the Dev teams.
Customers/PO's are the drivers for success, it is their product, they "Think Simple" while Dev teams "Think Complex"!
Bashar Faraneh
Technical Product Manager.