Is Our Customer Winning?

Customers are not paying for your product, they are hiring your product and are paying for positive outcomes and impacts. Agile was marketed with promise of faster value delivery to customer but as it went mainstream many organizations focused only on mastering different elements of agile frameworks and progress is being measured by vanity metrics such as velocity and burndown charts leaving customer success sideways. Organizations and teams must realize that while ‘speed to launch’ is crucial ‘speed to learning’ is even more important as they deliver features and products. How we respond to these learning’s can drive a radical change in focus from ‘Velocity of Story Point’ delivered to ‘Velocity of Learning’gained and answering the fundamental question of ‘Is our Customer Winning?’. To accomplish this mindset shift, agile teams need to learn to move their focus from mastering the art of writing perfect user stories to connecting their teams with the users of their products and the ‘problems & challenges their customers are trying to solve’. Taking teams to the next level of making the customer successful through continuous delivery of valuable product requires an alignment between the product managers, analysts, engineering team and their customers. It requires the product managers and analyst to understand the difference between product success and customer success.