The basis of trust between the customer and team is the making and fulfilling of mutual commitments. The customer commits to open discussion of needs and to accept challenge from the team in order to reach a shared understanding of those needs. The team commits to priorities and to delivery.

The team must be able to exercise influence over the customer in its role of trusted advisor. When the customer brings unrealistic expectations over the rate of delivery or of potential solutions the team uses its influence, supported with data and other information, to change those expectations. The customer, in turn, must be open to being influenced by the team in its role of trusted advisor.

To be customer led means to listen to the customer about their needs and priorities. We avoid getting into situations where we are “telling the customer”. Being trusted partners we offer guidance and advice, but we are still fundamentally led by the customer’s voice.

We agree priorities with the customer and work to deliver in alignment with those priorities. Where there are conflicting needs we seek a mutual understanding of the need to change priorities. As the customer’s needs change we adapt our priorities accordingly so that we can still deliver the best value to the customer.

To sustain an effective relationship with the customer, we need to ensure that our interactions are effective. Openness and transparency are essential from both sides. Willingness to offer and accept feedback and to act on that feedback is crucial to a successful, long-term, trusting relationship between the team and the customer.

When our customers’ needs are unclear or even in conflict with other needs we need to help the customer achieve a resolution. Our focus is on using experiments to quickly clarify and resolve the customers’ real need. We collaborate with the customer to define the experiments we need, the order in which they will be performed. We also define how we can exit the experiment process when our data provides sufficient confirmation of our hypotheses.

We need to be aware of the quality of the relationships between our teams and the customers. Where we observe excellent collaboration we can leave the relationship to evolve over time. Where we observe imbalanced or deteriorating relationships we should seek sufficient forewarning to allow us to encourage the parties to change behaviour. In the worst cases we may need to intervene to improve the situation before relationships breakdown completely.

Within our chosen market segment we have products that address many of our customers’ needs. To sustain the competitive position of our products, we need to maintain awareness of the way that customers’ needs are changing and how our competitors are evolving their products. Beyond this we need to understand our market and adjacent markets well enough to find opportunities for the innovation of new products.

All aspects of the agile mindset are underpinned by a quantitative understanding of our work, of our progress and of the value it will provide. We use data to understand the problems we are facing into and to prioritise the sequence in which we resolve those problems.

When we don’t know how to solve a problem, or when we are faced with situations where we don’t know how to progress, we use experimentation to rapidly make progress. Even if our hypotheses turn out to be wrong, we can use that knowledge to decide how to proceed to the next step.

We validate our work and our ways of working by seeking frequent feedback from customers, leaders, and other stakeholders. We respond rapidly and transparently to requests for feedback from others. Frequent feedback gives many opportunities to adjust requirements, priorities, and ways of working to better need stakeholder needs.

We take advantage of every opportunity to learn from events and from experience. We learn as teams and as individuals. A key part of the resilience of the agile mindset is how we react to the failures that we will inevitably experience as we work on complex, adaptive problems. Our resilient response is to treat a failure as an opportunity to learn. We seek the causes of failure and to learn how to avoid those causes in the future.