Understanding Your Customer’s Needs: Agile Heretic Episode Six
Agile is about understanding what your customer needs and figuring out how to get it done. It seems like a simple statement, but most teams are designed to specifically avoid this very necessary prerequisite. We have other people talk to customers, let them generate a list of needs, then we obfuscate those needs in user stories, and by the time we are done, we end up with feature descriptions that seem personal but are even more devoid of context than a BRD.
That’s not acceptable. We have a million ways of talking directly to customers. Developers, testers, operations people … need to talk to customers.
If you don’t talk to them, if you don’t hear them, you will give them something they don’t want.
This is just one story I have of how to do that.
Jim Benson is the creator and co-author of Personal Kanban. His other books include Why Limit WIP, Why Plans Fail, and Beyond Agile. He is a winner of the Shingo Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking and the Brickell Key Award. He teaches online at Modus Institute and consults regularly, helping clients in all verticals create working system. He regularly keynotes Agile and Lean conferences, focusing on the future of work.
