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Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework

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Re: Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework

#11

Post by buscoquadnary »

allenleee wrote: post #8

I believe this approach will lead you to very incremental solutions. It lowers the cost of failure (downside), but also the potential impact of success (upside). This approach determines your mindset as a product designer and destroys your potential product/business upside upfront. Most users get pitched "understandable ideas" because builders think they have to prove market fit before building product depth. The mos…

That's the exact idea behind Agile. Sure it may limit some impact of success, but I bet you way more people are blowing millions of dollars trying to pull big products out of their hat.

And for the record the number of "visionaries" is incredibly small, and pretty much everyone I've ever met that considered themselves a "visionary" is a con artist that talks a good game, has the technical acumen of day old mayonnaise and excuses being a colossal a-hole because Steve Jobs did it that way.

EDIT: Further I am realizing your talk about creating markets isn't so true either.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, none of these companies were really visionary, and they are the biggest names around.

Re: Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework

#13

Post by teucris »

I’ve been whining about the constant agile-bashing for a while…I understand that implementing agile often leads to the MSDM model (many small death marches) but I never quite got the loathing agile gets from the tech community.

I think this gives me a glimpse. To me, agile is about adjusting your planning so you can get customer feedback and adjust your project accordingly. Without that, much of what I value from agile goes out the window.

Re: Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework

#16

Post by usrusr »

Seems to rest on the assumption that customers want to. But in my experience, quite often the unspoken goals include not only "cheap" and "finished yesterday", but also "without bothering me outside of a fancy kickoff and that penultimate mission accomplished meeting where I bikeshed off through all the shades of blue"

That desire can still only be served by its opposite, talking to the customer, but it's a scarce resource, not just something you don't use enough of. Similar to how "finished yesterday" can only be solved by more time, but that can't be time measured in decades.

Re: Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework

#18

Post by WantonQuantum »

Nowado wrote: post #7
yomkippur wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually the other way around I found but yeah important to know where the customers are first and how to reach them. If you want to find a customer, you need to have a product in my experience. Very few outside of US are willing to risk take.

They likely don't mean 'customer' in the sense of a paying one, but a person with a need you can fulfil and resources to compensate you with. It's sort of potential, not yet actualized aspect of a 'customer' as a piece of a 'person', that would become 'real' in a presence of your product.

Yep, that's what I meant.

Re: Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework

#19

Post by nickmyersdt »

teucris wrote: post #13

I’ve been whining about the constant agile-bashing for a while…I understand that implementing agile often leads to the MSDM model (many small death marches) but I never quite got the loathing agile gets from the tech community. I think this gives me a glimpse. To me, agile is about adjusting your planning so you can get customer feedback and adjust your project accordingly. Without that, much of what I value from agi…

Agile works when everything in your business aligns with it as a way of working.

It fails (and therefore is loathed) when the people who need time, focus, room, safety to achieve the outcomes are forced into working with particular processes, procedures or tools in order to satisfy someone other than the team or the customer.

Re: Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework

#20

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

teucris wrote: post #13

I’ve been whining about the constant agile-bashing for a while…I understand that implementing agile often leads to the MSDM model (many small death marches) but I never quite got the loathing agile gets from the tech community. I think this gives me a glimpse. To me, agile is about adjusting your planning so you can get customer feedback and adjust your project accordingly. Without that, much of what I value from agi…

The main problems I’ve seen are:

- followed as a religion, especially when it doesn’t make sense (daily stand up for a team working in the same room and collaborating all day long? One day lost every 2 week for planning and review? Trying to do a stand up with too many people?)

- using it as an excuse to not prepare the project and without clear objective

- trying to fit agile in a fixed schedule (like trying to sync with a big marketing release, complete with pre reserved tv spot 1 year in advance)

- not listening to the final customer - heck, not even making sure he’s interested - trying to complexity it by adding a lot of metrics (financial is a big one)

- making estimate as the law

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