Agile Customer Thinking

We are redesigning our organizations to fit the 21st century. Configuring them for learning, flexibility and adaptability—to unleash the capacity that lies in talents and teams and to meet the changing demands and habits of the customers.

Agile Customer Thinking is an MVP — of itself. It’s a conceptual approach being explored and tested with the goal of helping agile teams fuel themselves on the customer value creation and deliver to their agile goals.

An agile responsive organization needs something to respond to

There is a gap between what we want our organizations to become and what we put into them to get there.

Our imagination is shaped by the tools we use to see the world — the data we collect, the experiences we engage in and the stories we share. 

The old 20th century organization as we know it is a bullet on a set trajectory towards it’s target. Its goal to employ feats of efficiency and standardization in order to keep momentum and force—to hit its target as close to optimal as possible. The modern organization is flexible, autonomus, able to react and recreate at full speed. The organization is designed to find and hit moving targets, that keep changing, and sometimes in utter darkness.

Agile teams are not struggling with speed, but with value. They need more help effectively accessing the customer problem.

According to Steve Denning agile is comprised of three laws:

1. The law of the small team — where most efforts in agile have been concentrated the last decade.

2. The law of the network — turning the small team into a networks of teams)

3. The law of the customer — feeding the teams with data in order to respond

Steve Denning, Explaining Agile
Steve Denning, Age og agile

Agile Customer thinking solves many of Denning’s requirements for customer input in the agile organization:

1. Creating a passionate obsession in the team to deliver more value to customers

2. Everyone has a clear line of sight to the customer

3. Everyone can see how their own work is adding value to that customer

Making the organisation agile doesn’t help if it only becomes more efficient at missing the product-market-fit

“What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers ‘value,’ is decisive—it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper”

- Peter Drucker (1954)—from Steve Denning, The Age of Agile 

Agile Customer Thinking is not a linear sequential process but an interconnected messy process. With the goal of surprising the team and outputting unexpected results.

JOBS-TO-BE-DONE - Agile Customer Thinking employs a customer framework to the project. Working with a tailored version of the Jobs-to-be-done framework. Understanding the customers context and the progress they are trying to achieve or the struggle they are trying to overcome. Adopting the customers world view is central to Agile Customer Thinking.

RISKIEST ASSUMPTIONS TESTING - Agile Customer Thinking steals its experimental approach from lean processes finding the smallest and simplest way to engage with the customer in order to learn and improve any solution or find any answer. Agile Customer Thinking breaks down what we want to achieve. It uses the hypothesis we have towards our customers and the assumptions supporting these hypothesis. Then we find a way to test these assumptions, develop them and continually improve and test them.

CUSTOMER VALUE PROPOSITION - How do we measure the value of what we are doing? How do we know when we are producing value for the customer, and when this customer value delivers value back to the organization? Agile Customer Thinking develops a set of customer value propositions that we test and measure against, and continuously adopt.

BUSINESS PROCESSES & ORGANIZATION - How do we measure the commercial value of what we are doing? We have to do more than evaluate the value of our results based on the customers success. We also include a set of business variables in order to find if we are solving the organizations challenges and meeting the investment goals.

DESIGN FOR DATA CREATION & COLLECTION - Customer interactions need to be designed not only for customer value and action, but data collection and insight. We design any customer interaction conscious of how it could help us generate more insight and more data.

TRAINING - Agile Customer Thinking requires training. A mindset shift towards becoming experimenters, in addition to publishers or product owners etc. And a move from consensus to consent.

There are a number of advantages to Agile Customer Thinking.

A. DATA
In an Agile Customer Thinking approach we are using data all the time. So its not a linear process with data at the beginning, its more a circular process with data at the center, like a hub, feeding every process all the time.

B. REAL-TIME
The nature of physical interviewing and prototyping takes weeks or months to plan, execute and analyze. An organization in a digital environment does not necessarily have this luxury. With Agile Customer Thinking we are testing and measuring with real time behavior online. Making an instant feedback loop giving the organization needed insight before it becomes outdated.

C. AT SCALE
On digital platforms we can test and collect behavioral data at scale — at close to no additional cost. 

D. LOW COST
Agile Customer Thinking ideally tries to redesign or improve current platforms or business practices.

E. HAWTHORNE-EFFECT
With Agile Customer Thinking there is no indication to the customer that they are in a test. They are experiencing and engaging with a service that they perceive as valuable in itself and they act according to their instincts and motivations. 

F. CONTINUOUS
In Agile Customer Thinking the process is continuous. We are always running experiments, always collecting behavioral data.

G. INCLUSIVE
Sharing its data openly with anyone on the team / in the organization all the time. Everyone is enabled to be the analyst. Anyone can translate the messy ambiguity into a solution. It is a democratic, inclusive model.

H. AGILE
Agile Customer thinking is built to fuel the agile organization. It has been tailored to fit the need for continuous input that small teams are dependent upon to learn, evaluate and improve.

VALUES:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Agile Customer Thinking is not a linear, but a a messy process. It’s a way of doing things that in itself is agile. It helps teams identify how they want to support the customer, and suggests a way to break down the customer problem into parts that the team is able to work towards and solve. A messy process does not command obedience, it offers a map of opportunities. So that as individuals and interactions change the messy process is always there to help the teams with what they need — when they need it. The team and the inputs control the messy process — the process does not control the team.

A messy process does not command obedience, it offers a map of opportunities.

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Agile Customer Thinking does not produce endless amounts of content that the team members have to study. It adapts to the teams capabilities, work rhythm and communication. And finds a fit between what the team needs to learn, the limitations and opportunities of the agile process.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
 Agile Customer Thinking proposes a way to collaborate with the customer continuously, in real-time and at scale. It’s engineered so that the collaboration is not deliberate and conscious on the part of the customer. If they know they are being analyzed and observed their behaviors and priorities change (the Hawthorne effect), which is a grave potential error source. Agile Customer Thinking engages the customer in interactions and from these interactions are able to learn what motivates and drives the customer. The answers are not found by asking questions directly. We engage the customer in specially engineered interactions — and from these learn and deduct the customers motivation.

Responding to change over following a plan

Agile Customer Thinking is a messy process. It is engineered to respond to all potential changes in an agile project. The impulses and inputs enable the different parts of the process in a fluent, agile manner.

PRINCIPLES:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Agile Customer Thinking offers a way to understand what the customer finds valuable, in a form and format that is at scale, in real-time and continuous. It offers the team access to why the customer finds it valuable — not only what they ask for or interact with.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Agile Customer Thinking offers the team continuous insight into the motivation and demands of the customer. As the customer is exposed to new opportunities, new data and insight emerges. Agile Customer Thinking is able to continuously feed this back to the team to make decisions all through the project / all the way down the rabbit hole.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

The customer perspective has to be a part of the discussion. Customer Agile Thinking puts the customer perspective into the priorities of the business people and the developers (it does not require its own role — everyone is a customer ambassador). To make sure the decisions are not made purely between business and developer priorities but that the customer demands and values are a part of the equation.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

Agile Customer Thinking builds on The Law of the Customer introduced in Explaining Agile by Steve Denning. Agile Customer Thinking captures customer data and demonstrate to the team members how their contribution creates value and is meaningful to the customer. It gives everyone access to data and demonstrates a direct line of sight from the team members to the customer.

It gives everyone access to data and demonstrates a direct line of sight from the team members to the customer.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Agile Customer Thinking produces outcomes that promote discussion and action. This has to work in an immediate dynamic face-to-face environment. Agile Customer Thinking makes sure there is an increase in discussion where the customer is at the center and is prioritized.

Working software is the primary measure of progress. Agile processes promote sustainable development.

Agile Customer Thinking holds agile’s own feet to the fire (re. the first principle) to the extent that customer value creation is as an important measure of progress as is working software. And offers a way to capture and identify customer value with the same ease.

Agile Customer Thinking holds agile’s own feet to the fire

The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Agile Customer Thinking feeds a continuous system of action. It has to be immediate and it has to respond in almost real-time.

Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

Agile Customer Thinking gives the team direct access to what is valuable to the customer. And helps the team discuss which actions need to be prioritized and which can be avoided (not-done).

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

Agile Customer Thinking helps self-organizing teams make their own decisions by setting information free and giving the team the information they need to operate autonomously.

Agile Customer Thinking helps self-organizing teams make their own decisions by setting information free

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Agile Customer Thinking sees effectiveness in direct relation to what is and isn’t creating customer value. And it will assist the team by giving access to customer insight that helps the team prioritize their resource and investments.