Get closer to your customers every day

Deep dive into the Agile Principle : "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."

How do we do that on a daily basis? Steve Jobs remarks is a great insight here : "Get closer and closer to the customer so that we we know what they need before they realize themselves".

Important practical step on this , is to to realize and visualize that- "the tickets we solve are for actual people and every time we are helping them come out of their pain and frustrations.So a good practice could be that, as we look into each feature, backlog item, ticket- take few seconds to reflect "for whom" are we solving this problem and visualize what could be their Goals-Daily Activities-Frustrations.Use your organization chart and a simple persona card created to help you on this. In simple terms , everyday you should have 100% clarity that for each of your activity "who" is your customer and what pain you are removing for him/her.

Check out the following 2 ways that can improve customer interactions and move your organization forward.

1.Ensure customer or their representative is an integral element of the team.

Involvement is the most effective tool for gaining buy-in. If your client cannot provide feedback someone to work with the team on a daily basis, you should at least have a dedicated bi-weekly time with the customer .Any more delayed time to have a cutomer interaction is moving away from agile.

2.Ensure customer also gets into the habit of tiny, incremental feedback.

Many traditional projects can take months to complete, only to discover that the customer received something they did not want or need. The sprint result is shown to the customer for feedback using agile. If something goes wrong, no more than three weeks should be lost.