Defining Customer Needs
Our vision, strategy, roadmap and backlog all align to the needs of our customers. After all, if we don’t meet our customers’ needs why would they bother to use our products? We need to understand the needs and priorities of our customers in order to have a clear path of work for our teams.
Those responsible for leading the development of a product need to have effective and efficient mechanisms for eliciting needs and priorities. They need to be able to share how the product will evolve so that customers can anticipate when their needs will be met. They should establish a consensus that the development path of the product is appropriate.
One of the key ‘things’ in Agile is ensuring we have a clear shared understanding of requirements. A key part of this is ensuring that the size of a piece of work fits well within a proposed time frame and doesn’t bottle neck our process while we try to get it to ‘done’. But how effectively can we really right-size work?