Driver of Customer Feedback

Customer engagement focuses on establishing meaningful and honest ­customer relationships with the goal of gaining continuous customer feedback to truly identify what is valuable to the customer.

The key to engaging customers is to gain their precious customer input and feedback. The input and feedback should be the basis for driving a majority of your decisions and setting the direction of a product. As you look to build a customer-value-driven engine within your enterprise, the customer, or more specifically customer feedback, is the “driver” that steers the engine of ­customer value, as illustrated in Figure 6-1.

Figure 6-1. Customer feedback is the driver that steers the customer-value-driven engine

If you start driving with certainty, either pretend or arrogant, you can be led to the wrong planet, moon, or satellite because you are flying blind and missing the signs that steer you toward value. The question is, “Who do you want steering your spaceship?” Do you want someone internal to your company that embraces certainty but is wearing blinders, or do you want someone who embraces customer feedback and continually adapts (that is, steers) their way toward customer value?

Customer Feedback Bull's-eye

The customer provides the most effective feedback to help shape product direction toward customer value. The customer provides both input for ideas of value and feedback for validating the product in its process of getting created. It is critical to engage customers. Look around you at your teams. Are you and your teams directly applying customer input and feedback toward customer value? If not, then you are probably guessing, and this means that it is time to methodically engage with customers.

Within an Agile context, the customer is the most important voice in shaping the direction of the product. Your goal is to identify and engage customers, which can help you shape the product journey. Not all customers are created equal. Some customers are committed to your product, while others may have mild interest. Some customers use the product one way, while others use the product another way.

This is where the importance of customer personas comes into play. If one user uses a computer to program and another uses a computer to work on spreadsheets, you have two different customer personas who use a computer. The primary message is to understand that there are various types of customers in your customer journey. You can learn more about the importance of personas and how to establish and use personas to get closer to customer value in Chapter 14.

Since you may have multiple customers, you need someone to engage with the various types of customers. Within an Agile context, the product owner is meant to be the voice of the customer and should be educated on how to engage, solicit, converge, and prioritize feedback from customers. You can learn more about the product owner and other roles in an Agile context in Chapter 8.

As you look beyond customers and product owners, you must recognize that there are people within the company that are engaged in bringing a successful product to market. I term these people the stakeholders. They contribute to the success of the product by providing a healthy environment to work, crafting a strategy or vision, identifying product and services ideas, understanding the marketplace, engaging with customers at some level, or building the product. Now that you are familiar with customers, product owners, and stakeholders, the next step is to establish your customer feedback bull's-eye.

Figure 6-2 illustrates the concept of a customer feedback bull's-eye where the customer is in the middle followed in the next ring of the circle by the product owner. They are surrounded by stakeholders. Those stakeholders closer to the customer that bring customer feedback into the process would be the next circle within the target. This would be followed by those less customer-focused.

Figure 6-2. Customer feedback bull’s-eye

Customer Universe Surrounding the Agile Galaxy

Chapter 4 discusses the Agile galaxy and how it represents the Agile landscape within your company. Where do customers live in relation to your galaxy? From a business context, your Agile galaxy is within a sea of the customer universe. As illustrated in Figure 6-3, customers live all around your Agile galaxy (or at least you hope they do!). What you hope is to tap into those customers and find out what they need and then build it.

Figure 6-3. The Agile galaxy surrounded by the customer universe

On the left side of the delivery axis of the Agile galaxy is where you capture ideas of customer value. The ideas can come from various places—from people within the company and from customers external to the company. Engaging customers can start by soliciting their ideas for customer value or getting their feedback on whether an idea is perceived to be of value.

There are many places to gain the valuable customer input and feedback all along the delivery axis. Customer feedback is an important component of the CVD framework. This includes customer input and feedback when capturing, valuating, refining, developing, and releasing an idea to reflecting on the results of an idea.

Customers form the basis for a value-driven enterprise. A well-run startup painfully understands the value of customer feedback since it can make a difference whether it goes under or grows. Ensure customers are an integral part of your value-driven engine. To put customer feedback into action, consider reading Chapter 14, where you learn how to establish a customer feedback vision.

Customers in a Value-Driven Enterprise

How are customers and a value-driven enterprise related? The definition of a CVD enterprise is a company that optimizes for what the customers find as valuable and more specifically what they are willing to buy and use. This is why it is so important to think like the customers.

What the customers see as progress is not the standard project documents, a project plan that indicates the task completion, or status reports. Rather, customers see progress as tangible working product functionality. They purchase working product, not the plans, status reports, and other administrative items.

Customers delight in seeing working product in action and the inspect-and-adapt approach allows customers to consider and adjust their needs until they are transformed into a valuable working product. Progress is not advanced until a piece of functionality is built with quality, meets the customer acceptance criteria, and is available for review by the customer.

Functionality equates to value for the customer and ultimately means delivering business value. This implies that you have to continuously engage with the customer to get there. Engaging with customers only while gathering requirements and approaching product release is not enough. You need to continuously engage with customers as you are actively building the product throughout its life cycle.

Learning Your Way to Customer Value

The concept of learning what the customer finds as valuable is an important mindset in the journey of customer value. It allows us to shed the dangerous attitude of pretend or arrogant certainty and allows us to really explore what the customer needs. When you fix customer requirements up front and plan the path to delivery without continuously engaging with the customer, you might stick to the plan with success, but you will incrementally veer away from what the customer finds valuable. Figure 6-4 illustrates this challenge.

Figure 6-4. Aiming for customer value

The question is, “Is it better to stick to the plan or adapt toward customer value?” How many people have seen companies decide to stick to the path of pretend or arrogant certainty, inevitably creating a product that few customers want, ergo missing customer value? While this may sound obvious, have you ever encountered companies where the plan rules?

The moment you engage with customers on a continual basis, the plan will not survive. Is it better to deal with a changing plan and deliver something the customer actually wants, or is it better to stick to the plan and end up delivering functionality the customer does not want? Keep in mind that if you are not listening to your customers, your competitors will be.

The better approach is to incorporate the concept of learning what is customer value. This is a discovery method of gaining incremental information through various methods associated with getting customer feedback and taking what you learned to continuously adapt toward customer value. Continuous learning of customer needs is important to get closer to certainty. As illustrated in Figure 6-4, the incremental nature of adapting to what is learned leads us toward the customer value target. Learn more about the discovery mindset and how it can help you adapt your way to delivering customer value in Chapter 10.

Enterprise Anti-patterns of Attaining Customer Value

Value is in the eye of the beholder. Smart people will say that the beholder is the customer. While in most companies, there will be a saying similar to “the customer is king,” some have lost their way and have somehow forgotten the importance of customers and their feedback. The result is enterprise anti-patterns that impede customer value. There are a number of anti-patterns on why this occurs and the following are four:

• Believing that you can pretend to know what the customer wants upfront with certainty. This Pretend Certainty anti-pattern has the consequence of limiting options and being blind to customer needs.

• Focusing primarily on driving efficiencies through cost cutting and applying high utilization of people. This No Room at the Innovation Inn anti-pattern has the unintended consequence of a lesser focus on the customer with little room to innovate and adapt.

• Sub-optimizing for the comfort of having a ­well-established plan and set of well-defined processes. This Sub-optimizing for Comfort anti-pattern has the consequence of limiting change at the expense of adapting to customer needs.

• Engaging few customers to represent the customer pool. The Few and the Missing anti-pattern has the consequence of missing customer needs.

When you are a startup, you realize the importance of being customer-value-driven because if customers don’t buy the product, the startup goes under. That doesn’t mean that a startup has the right product, culture, or processes to become successful; it is that they know that without understanding customers’ needs, their hopes for a successful product or service are slim. Because of this and their small size, most startups will stay very close to the customer or potential customer.

When companies become larger, there is a greater chance the anti-patterns that impact customer value will exist. There is a likelihood of adding more processes, which results in more steps away from employee to the customer. As companies grow, there are tendencies to put more controls in place to manage cost and, unfortunately, this leads to restricting change. A company begins to optimize for its own processes and plans. This distances itself from customers. As a company grows, there needs an explicit action to remain close to the customer. The question for you is, “Do you see these anti-­patterns effecting customer value in your enterprise?”

One of the Agile values is responding to change over following a plan. While there may be a high-level benefit to a plan, responding to changes from customers is where there is more value. More information on the Agile manifesto and its values and principles can be found in Chapters 3 and 5.

Customer Challenges of Understanding Value

Another primary reason why it can be challenging to get to customer value is that many times the customers don’t really know what they want. They think they know what they want and they will attempt to provide their best guess on what they are looking for.

There are number of reasons for this. First, customers cannot always articulate their needs at the moment you ask. Instead, they may provide an idea that may solve their most current issue, which may not really lead to their biggest need. Second, customers are not aware of the options or possibilities so they tend to gravitate toward what they know. A rumored quote by Henry Ford highlights this mindset, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’.” Third, the landscape of customer needs changes regularly. Customer value can be an elusive target and changes constantly. If customers have to wait six months or a year for what they want, they may have moved on and now want something different.

This is where the advantage of a discovery and incremental mindset comes in handy. This way, you can learn what the customer wants. A corollary to this is that the customers don’t know what they want until they see it. By initiating demonstrations, customers can see what they said they wanted and can respond toward what they really want. Inversely, when building something that is considered innovative, showing the customers something that is incrementally being built offers them the opportunity to respond toward customer value.

Is Customer Feedback an Integral Part of Your Customer-Value Engine?

This chapter walks us through many aspects in understanding customers and the importance of their feedback. A customer is very specifically defined. Customers have a choice and they pay money to your company. Some organizations apply the term “customer” too liberally to those internal to the company. While such people are stakeholders, they are not the customer. This is an important mindset shift, and this message needs to be shared with all of those within the enterprise.

Customer feedback provides the direction that steers the customer-value engine toward the direction of customer value. Customers see progress as working product and delight in seeing working product in action. The discovery and incremental approach allows customers to reflect on and adjust their needs until they are transformed into a valuable working product. Believing that progress is best realized in the form of working product is an important mindset shift to embrace.

Identifying what the customer finds as valuable is a learning opportunity and an important mindset in the journey toward customer value. It allows us to shed the dangerous attitude of pretend or arrogant certainty and really explore what customers need. At the end of the day, it is important to make the customer king. You just need to ensure the customers are guiding you by gaining their valuable feedback along the way.