Creating a Customer Validation Vision
Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation.
—Steven Pressfield
Engaging the customer is one of the most important aspects of building customer value. Gaining continuous customer feedback of working software is an important aspect of the inspect-and-adapt model, which ensures that you are constructing a valuable solution for the customer. Without customer validation, you are not really applying Agile; you are just doing a form of iterative development without aligning your work with customers’ need. Although the engineering practices applied within an agile project focus on building the product right, the validation practices focus on building the right product.
Chapter 4 discusses the importance of customer engagement. This chapter helps you establish the building blocks to achieve continuous customer validation via an approach I call the Agile Customer Validation Vision. The notion of thinking through and establishing an authentic validation approach for the product is missing from agile projects and practices. This vision provides a framework for identifying the right customers, constructing customer profiles, identifying personas, establishing continuous validation sessions, motivating the customers to attend the validation sessions, and incorporating their feedback.
A business representative such as the Product Owner is responsible for constructing this vision and characterizing in detail the customers who are valuable to the company. That information helps in identifying who should attend the Sprint Reviews of the working software to supply the most valuable customer feedback. You learned about the PO’s role in Chapter 12. This chapter enlarges on that responsibility in regards to customer validation.
Whether or not you formally establish an Agile Customer Validation Vision, consider performing these activities to ensure you are working with the right customers to provide the valuable feedback you need so that you are building the right thing.
Identifying the Right Customers
A precondition of effective continuous customer engagement is identifying your key stakeholders. Stakeholders are those people who have a business interest in your work. They include senior management, sponsors, and customers who have a stake in the success of building customer value.
The key stakeholders are the customers. The primary reason is that without customers perceiving value in your products and buying them, your company will not stay in business. The key to engaging the customer is finding the right customers who can actually help you identify and build customer value. To do this, customers should be segmented into target groups according to their different business needs.
Agile Pit Stop Your key stakeholders are your customers. If customers don’t perceive value in your products and buy them, your company will not stay in business.
You may be saying to yourself that your product management, sales, and marketing groups help you with identifying customers. This is good, and in Agile it is important to foster the team mindset by including their participation and introducing these groups to the engineering teams.
However, you need a single person, such as the Product Owner, to merge customer needs and decide on which customers will be the focus for requirements gathering and validation events. The ultimate goal is to bring the customers to your Sprint Reviews of your working software to prove value or adapt according to their feedback. Someone needs to be responsible for identifying the right customers and for all the activities involved with continuous customer engagement. You need a dedicated business representative on your team who is focused on building customer value within your products.
Customer Target Groups
Customers come in a variety of forms and may be identified and categorized in a variety of ways. The key is to establish your customer segments or target groups. At the broadest level, customer target groups include:
- Current customers
- Potential customers
- Past customers
The challenge with identifying the elusive customer value is that potential customers often see value differently than do current customers. More challenging is that even current customers may see customer value differently. Identifying target groups help you understand what they need and what they don’t need.
Agile Pit Stop The challenge with identifying the elusive customer value is that different customer target groups see customer value differently.
It is important to know that your current customers are the real buyers of your product, must be treated well, and are your highest priority. The potential customer group represents an opportunity to grow your revenue. Potential customers represent both potential buyers and browsers. Although it is hard to differentiate between potential buyers versus browsers, it can affect their priority within the overall customer pool. If you have past customers, it is important to keep track of who they are in case you want to revisit them. You can often glean important information from a past customer from the perspective of what they did not like about the product and what it might take to bring them back into the fold again.
Within the current customer group, it is important to identify which customers are leaders and which ones are followers. A leader is a customer who embraces your product, is willing to speak positively about it, has the cachet to attract other customers, and is eager to discuss requirements. A follower might use the product but not necessarily advocate for it. You want to identify the leaders. In some cases, with the right grooming, you can convert a follower into a leader. Grooming may entail engaging them in your requirements discussions and Sprint Reviews.
Identify Personas
Personas represent specific users of a product and act as examples of the types of users who would interact with it. Most products have several personas that use the product in different ways. Examples of three personas for a product are the regular user, power user, and administrator.
- The regular user uses only the basic user interface functionality.
- The power user needs more detailed interface functionality to handle more sophisticated work.
- The administrator needs back-end installation and maintenance functionality.
All three use the product differently, and different features are built for their respective needs. Personas are a powerful way to guide your decisions about functionality and ensure that you are, in fact, building functionality for each persona.
Personas should be identified early on in the development of the product. Often personas are discovered within the user story collection or grooming activities. Personas are a key ingredient in the way that user stories can be presented. Including the persona in a story description provides you the point of view (POV) of a user story and defines who that user story is for. Chapter 18 offers more insights into the importance of including personas in user story writing. A persona glossary should be shared with the developers so they understand for whom they are building the user stories and so QA understands the POV for testing the user story.
Agile Pit Stop Personas provide three distinct advantages. The team understands the users better, which helps guide decisions about functionality. The user stories are written to support and build functionality for personas. Based on their personas, the Product Owner knows who can give the best feedback and therefore whom to invite to the Sprint Reviews.
I recommend that you establish a description for each persona. This description is typically illustrated as a fictitious person that represents a real role. It will include the knowledge, experience, and activities of that role. By writing a persona as a fictitious person with a name, this makes the persona easier to imagine and relate to, as in the following examples.
- Eric is a regular user of the product and primarily uses it to take courses. He has a bachelor’s degree in communications. He has little time to take online courses but is interested in doing so. He works from home on occasion and uses his tablet for work-related matters as well as taking courses.
- Iman is a power user and supports the executives within her company. She uses the product to run reports to understand if regular users are taking courses and which courses are most popular. She likes to make her management happy by producing easy-to-read dashboards.
- Sherris is an administrator for the company. She has a bachelor’s degree in IT and five years of experience in the product support field. She enjoys supporting products and has taken additional technical skills training in the maintenance and support area.
Personas are beneficial to the Sprint Review context. When a team is demonstrating a feature, invite customers from the persona target group for that feature so you get the right feedback. If personas are part of the written user story, then you know which persona should be reviewing the working software of that demonstrated user story. For example, when you are demonstrating a feature that focuses on administration tasks, then the best feedback comes from having a customer who represents the administrator.
Establish Customer Profiles
Now that you have sorted your customers into current, potential, and past customers and established product-specific personas, you should construct profiles for each customer, giving priority to your current and then your potential customers. Each customer profile paints a picture of the company and the customers therein. It can help you make a range of business decisions. The two key decisions are which customers are best suited to provide user stories, and which are best suited to attend customer validation events and provide the valuable customer feedback.
Just as with the agile inspect-and-adapt model, you need to adapt your customer profiles to their changing business posture and needs. A customer profile identifies common traits in your target customers and may include:
- Demographics
- Buying patterns
- Areas of interest regarding functionality
- Personas of the product they represent
- Whether the customer is perceived as a leader or follower
- What value they are receiving from your product
Within the context of customer validation, the goal is to identify and select customers who meet the profile you are looking for and who are willing to provide feedback.
Customer Demonstrations
The primary way to be continually in touch with your customers and ensure you are building customer value is to provide customers with the opportunity to validate the working software. This engagement is critical to inspect-and-adapt model to ensure the narrowest possible gap between what is delivered and what the customer needs at the time of delivery. Studies show that customer validation opportunities are fewer than expected.
According to a self-reported survey, only 57 percent of the respondents affirmed that “at the end of each iteration, we demo our work. 1 ” Worse, only 38 percent say, “We demo the solution to stakeholders every iteration.” These results are sobering. They indicate a widespread lack of understanding of Agile values and principles and particularly in the importance of the inspect-and-adapt model with the customer.
The key to Agile is not just to adapt but to do so in the direction that closes in on business value. It is challenging to do this when stakeholders—particularly the customers—are not attending the continuous demonstrations of working software. The goal should be to get the customers to the demonstrations.
Types of Customer Validation
The Sprint Review is the gold standard for customer validation events at which the customer gets an opportunity to view the working software. Nonetheless, other validation activities can help you gain insight into what the customer finds valuable. You should describe in your customer vision the types of validation events you plan to have, such as the following:
- Product vision validation shares the vision of the release of the product to help you adapt to your customers’ needs at a strategic level.
- Sprint Review demos demonstrate the working software that was completed during the Sprint, shown to customers to highlight progress and gain feedback.
- Hands-on experience lets customers exercise the software in a hands-on manner in a simulated or pilot working environment to generate functional usage and usability feedback.
Motivate Customers to Attend
One of the common challenges that teams have when they want to get customers to the Sprint Review is figuring out how to actually get them to the event. Remember, customers are working full-time at another company and their time is precious. The key is to create a scenario that is compelling for the customer to attend and continue attending. So how do you get customers to attend?
Agile Pit Stop Customers who attend your validation events are working full-time at another company. Their time is precious. Use this time to gain their valuable feedback.
One approach is to start by inviting customers to one demo session and get their input. Customers who have not experienced something like this before typically are impressed to see working software so early in a release life cycle. They especially like to be asked for their feedback. If they like the first validation session, then invite them to the next demo session. If they agree, entice them by building in some of their feedback. If they show up for the second session, excite them by highlighting the points where you’ve incorporated their input. At this point, ask the customers if they want to participate periodically at a per-Sprint cadence.
As you are working on your Agile Customer Validation Vision, you should include your strategy on how to motivate customers to attend. You will find, however, that customers are motivated by different things, so you will need an array of motivational tactics within your strategy.
Incorporate Customer Feedback
Although it seems self-evident that you should incorporate customer feedback, too often this critical part of the inspect-and-adapt model is overlooked. Capturing customer feedback is important to ensure you are building the right thing. I have seen feedback either languish or not even get captured, which defeats the point of customer validation events and adapting to customer needs. It is critical that the feedback get incorporated into the backlog.
The feedback that you gain should be linked to the contributing user’s story, either as a change to an existing story or as a new story. You may also want to capture additional information that the customer shares regarding their own vision, strategies, and direction and incorporate it into their customer profile.
What Is Your Vision of Customer Validation?
Do you have a vision for adapting to customer needs? A haphazard approach may not serve you well. Customer validation is the cornerstone to the inspect-and-adapt approach. Otherwise, what are you adapting to? It will benefit you to continuously engage with customers and truly embrace and incorporate customer feedback, resulting in adapting your product based on the customer need. Consider methodically establishing an Agile Customer Validation Vision.
This vision provides a framework to:
- identify the right customers
- construct customer profiles
- identify product personas
- establish continuous validation sessions such as demonstrations
- motivate the customers to attend the validation sessions
- incorporate the feedback into current and new stories
Once you have established this vision, it is important to share it with the team so that everyone is aware of the vision and the importance of the validation activities.
1 Scott Ambler, “How Agile Are You? 2013 Survey Results,” http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/howAgileAreYou2013.html.